The run-up to Christmas dinner starts with the Christmas butchers' auction at Pateley Bridge today and a bigger one at Skipton tomorrow, followed by similar events at other livestock centres.
The Christmas fatstock sales get the year's biggest turn-out of butchers and butchers' buyers, looking for something special to offer, and the farmers respond with their best animals.
In this context, fat means ready for the butcher. But some auct
ioneers, including Craven Cattle Marts, which runs Skipton, have been rebranding 'fatstock' as 'primestock' with an eye on public perceptions.
The quality of the animals, the competitiveness of the bidding and the sense of occasion, make the Christmas sales a popular day out for spectators and some marts actively encourage them.
Last year, CCM renamed its Christmas 'primestock' show at Skipton the Craven Lingfield Show, using a local location name, and moved it to a Sunday, to try to capture some of the interest which used to focus on the Royal Smithfield Christmas Show before it moved out of London, in 2005.
Small butchers welcomed the chance to attend in person, rather than working through agents, and attendance and bids broke records.
The supreme beef animal sold for £2,912 (£5.30/kg) to a local farm shop and a champion pen of 47-kg Beltex-cross lambs for £580 each – by far a mart record price – to a buyer representing a big processor.
Nobody expects to recoup those prices from the customer. The buyers pay to show off their clout and for the value of the publicity. They talk of "umbrella purchases" which add prestige to everything else they sell.
Butcher Paul Kendall, who has shops in Pateley Bridge and Harrogate, said: "I will be at the Pateley sale on Saturday and at Skipton on Sunday and I will pay more than I need to for my Christmas beef and lamb, just so I can tell my customers they are getting the best we can possibly do."
The animals in question have often won prizes at the summer shows but that carries little weight at the fatstock shows, where judges and bidders look with a butcher's eye.
"It's the moment of truth," sums up Brian Bartle, a partner in the firm which runs Selby Mart.
And James Stephenson, for the York Auction Centre, agrees: "The ultimate test of any meat animal is the butcher's knife and we expect the judgements from here to filter back to the summer shows."
York Mart makes a particular effort to involve the wider world, with a reception for civic parties from York and Ryedale and provision of a spectator gallery over the main auction ring. Monday December 7 is its big day.
Selby has gone with Skipton in switching its big Christmas sale to a Sunday – December 6.
Thirsk has its big cattle day on Thursday December 3 and one for pigs on December 10. Northallerton's is Tuesday December 1; Hull, Monday December 7; Wharfedale (Otley) Monday December 7 for cattle and sheep, Monday December 14 for pigs.
Considering the rise of the turkey tradition, there is no similar event for live poultry, although several markets have a day of selling table-ready birds.
