From cold water swimming to bison grilling: how CEOs spend Christmas

Sean Doyle, British Airways

One of the toughest moments of British Airways boss Sean Doyle’s year comes on Christmas Day, when he takes his annual dip in the chilly waters of the north Atlantic.

The “invigorating” charity swim off the beaches of his hometown of Youghal, County Cork, is an annual tradition when Doyle is spending Christmas in Ireland, as he will this year.

“It must be 8 or 9 degrees, you don’t stay in too long but you feel great afterwards,” he says.

The day gets easier from there. Doyle is in charge of the gravy, but leaves the rest of the Christmas lunch to the “experts”, his wife and sisters.

The festive period is when the travel business comes into its own, as it brings together families and friends and provides plenty of what Doyle calls “Love Actually” moments, a reference to the British romcom film with a scene of people reuniting at Heathrow airport.

“It brings it all together when people want to reunite. It is an emotional period,” he says.

His flight to and from Ireland gives him a chance to keep a close eye on BA’s operations. He will typically pop his head into the cockpit and chat to the cabin crew, to “get some real feedback”.

But Christmas Day itself is comparatively quiet for airlines, so Doyle is able to relax.

Philip Georgiadis

Stuart Machin, Marks and Spencer

Winding down during the festive period is not an option for Stuart Machin, the chief executive of Marks and Spencer, as the upmarket British retail chain prepares for its busiest days of the year. 

“For me Christmas is about making sure we’re doing the right thing for the families relying on us to make their Christmas special,” he says.

Machin spends Christmas Eve visiting stores until around 7pm, and sometimes attends midnight mass, which he sees as an opportunity to reflect and give thanks.

On Christmas Day, he wakes up at 5am and walks his dog while checking the final sales numbers before heading out to Kent to see his parents and his brother’s family. They relax over a big breakfast and toast his late grandparents with Bucks Fizz.

Music always plays a big part during the day “from traditional carols to Mariah Carey’s Christmas concert” but Christmas never really begins until The King’s Speech. “I never miss it,” says Machin. “Since I was a young boy listening to The Queen, it’s always given me pause to reflect.”

For dinner, they start with seafood before having M&S’s free-range Pembrokeshire Heritage Blue turkey with all the trimmings. Machin oversees the basting, with salted butter, truffle salt and garlic.

“We all do the washing up before pudding. I helped develop our Collection Christmas pudding, so we’ll definitely be eating that!”

There is a brief respite on Boxing Day as shops will be shut but by evening Machin is “itching to get back into stores” and make sure they’re resetting for New Year’s Eve. 

Laura Onita

Scott Sheffield, Pioneer

Scott Sheffield, chief executive of Texas’s top oil producer, Pioneer Natural Resources, will spend Christmas Day grilling bison at the New Mexico ranch he bought from actress Jane Fonda. His wife will rustle up the trimmings. 

“I’m a big griller,” says Sheffield. “We can get bison out of Santa Fe fairly easily. It’s good — very lean, no fat at all.”

This Christmas marks the end of an era for the oilman, who is retiring for a second time after announcing a $60bn deal to sell Pioneer to ExxonMobil. But Sheffield, 71, intends to keep busy: after Christmas he heads to Taos Ski Valley in New Mexico with children and grandchildren where he intends to tackle double black diamond slopes. 

He hopes to ring in the new year with his alma mater University of Texas’s Longhorns prevailing in their first appearance in the college football play-off semi finals — and oil prices shifting back up towards $100 a barrel. 

Sheffield and his wife then head to Namibia to celebrate his retirement with a three-week safari in the Kalahari Desert, before returning to the US “to make sure this deal with Exxon gets closed”.

Is this year different? “It’s only different in that I’m really retiring this time — that’s the main difference.”

Myles McCormick

Amanda Wakeley, fashion designer

For the past decade, British fashion designer Amanda Wakeley has spent Christmas in Verbier, where she and her partner have a chalet. “We’ve taken a very different approach to Christmas since my father died,” says Wakeley. “He was huge on Christmas — he would start buying presents in July. But now we have a bit of a non-Christmassy Christmas.”

The celebration is all about enjoying the mountains. “Verbier is such
a place of fitness and fresh air. We tend to do a bit of a pilgrimage
skin for a few hours in the morning,” she says, referring to the
practice of attaching synthetic, snow-gripping skins to the bottom of
your skis to glide your way up the mountain — and then skiing back
down again. Their energetic Labrador, Luna, comes along too.

Wakeley and her partner, PR strategist Hugh Morrison, will meet friends at the Chalet Blanc, a private club in the mountains, for a festive glass of champagne before returning to their chalet for a long “highly indulgent” lunch. Then they settle down to watch The King’s Speech, followed by a film.

Wakeley, who closed her eponymous clothing business two years ago but kept the brand name and the intellectual property, says she can “switch off over Christmas more than I used to”. But she adds it is “not for long”. She is now working on potential licences and collaborations and gearing up for the fourth season of her Style DNA podcast. “I’d rather know what’s going on than come back to a huge inbox.”

Harriet Agnew

Victor Lugger, Big Mamma Group

Precision planning for the Christmas menu at the home of Big Mamma co-founder Victor Lugger started early, with a family Zoom call in late November.

From around 11am on Christmas Eve, it is all hands on deck in the Lugger family to prepare a succession of festive feasts, starting with a meal on December 24, followed by lunch on Christmas Day and capped off with a final dinner. 

“The most important thing is how can we eat everything we want to eat in only three meals,” says Lugger, a 39-year-old Frenchman, who runs the chain of Italian trattorias. 

Typically, Lugger, his wife and their three young children visit his parents in Strasbourg for Christmas, but this year they are hosting their extended family at their home in the upmarket London district of Hampstead for the first time. 

As a restaurateur whose most famous sites — East Mamma in Paris and Circolo Popolare in London — are known for their gluttonous portions of Italian food sourced directly from Bel Paese, Lugger’s Christmas guests can expect a feast. He will cook for 15 people on Christmas Eve, and 23 the next day. 

Following the video call, each family member embarks on their own special mission. Lugger begins “harassing” fishmongers to find “regal no. 3” oysters, his mother drives 30 minutes across the German border to source a special brown sourdough, and his sister travels an hour from her home in Paris to buy a particular paté en croute.

The family always attends midnight mass to usher in Christmas Day. Their French and German roots mean some relatives like to open gifts in a rush on December 24, while others do so methodically on Christmas Day. 

But food always takes priority. Other highlights of the menu include guinea fowl slow-cooked with morels and injected with vin jaune and white blood sausage. 

“There’s no time for board games . . . we’re cooking for four, five, six, seven hours,” says Lugger. “The reason why I became a restaurateur and the reason why we source everything direct from the producer is because that’s what we’ve always done in my family, and Christmas is the apotheosis of that moment.”

Oliver Barnes

Romi Savova, PensionBee

Juggling three kids under seven years old means pyjamas, pancakes and Peppa Pig cartoons on Christmas morning for Romi Savova, chief executive of FTSE 250 pension provider PensionBee.

After Christmas, the family have their chilly annual visit to the Gtech Community Stadium for the home game of Brentford Football Club, which is sponsored by London-based PensionBee.

After a month of investor meetings in London and New York, Savova says she is looking forward to Christmas as the only day she properly takes off work during the year. She closes the PensionBee main office for Christmas week for all except customer support staff.

Christmas at home means a traditional day of games and food. Presents are opened with the kids when they wake up, normally just hours after “furiously wrapping them the night before”. This year Savova has ordered M&S pyjamas for all the family so they can match for a “cheesy photo”.

“My family gets to be exposed to my cooking,” she says, “which can be hit and miss.”

Much of the afternoon will be taken up with a giant jigsaw puzzle. The family are keen Christmas puzzlers, she says, even owning the back board to keep the pieces in place and boxes to help sort. This year, Savova has bought a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle of Santa’s workshop. She predicts it could take some time: “Its all red!”

Daniel Thomas

Nicolai Tangen, Norway’s oil fund

The chief executive of Norway’s $1.4tn oil fund — the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund — says the festive season is all about having a “Norwegian Christmas, in England”.

“Christmas, and indeed life, is about family and friends, food and learning”, he says.

Nicolai Tangen, a former hedge fund manager in London who was born and educated in Norway, says his life has been spent roughly 50-50 in the two countries “so it’s natural that my Christmas is a fusion of the two”.

“It’s the best of both worlds: sill (herring), rakfisk (fermented trout) and a shot or two of aquavit — followed by walks on Hampstead Heath,” he adds.

An avid reader, Tangen says the festive season is a great time for books and he already has loaded on his Kindle Thomas Heatherwick’s Humanise on architecture, Andrew McAfee’s The Geek Way on running companies in a new way, John Vaillant’s Fire Weather on climate, and “for some fun” Terry Hayes’ The Year of the Locust.

“It’s also a good time to get ahead on some of my lighter work, like preparing for upcoming episodes of our podcast, In Good Company, where I interview the world’s best CEOs. Next up is Daniel Ek from [music streaming service] Spotify in January, so I’ll read up on the music industry to prepare. And maybe even binge [docudrama mini-series]The Playlist if I’m feeling lazy,” he adds.

Richard Milne

Mark Read, WPP

For Mark Read, Christmas is the only day he gets to switch off emails, and when the calls stop to and from the advertising firm’s clients.

It is an easier day for other reasons too. The advertising boss is forbidden from getting too involved in the work preparing or cooking for the Christmas Day meal — which involves his extended family coming to the house — after one year when he managed to put the turkey upside down in the oven. An accident, he admits, but “some recipes do say that this is what you should do”.

The young teens in the Read family are normally awake and opening presents after 6am so it’s an early start but the rest of the day is more relaxed, with the “alcohol content accelerating as the day goes on”, says Read.

There is time for a walk with the family and his dog Potato — a Dandie Dinmont Terrier. They also have their sledges ready in the hope of a white Christmas.

As night falls, the Read family settles in for the most traditional of Christmas pastimes: arguing about what movie or TV show to watch, with streaming services now multiplying the options (and arguments).

Daniel Thomas