Christmas Dinner

Via

I hope you all had a good Christmas with your family, or, if you are apart from them (for whatever reason) you had a good day nevertheless. Remember, home is where the heart is and even though if you are apart from your family, in your heart they are always with you.

Christmas is decoration, gifts, singing, family and (sometimes above all else) food. Many family have a traditional Christmas food they will put on and where else could you tell the cultural difference better than on the table?

Now, this is a general observation from what I have experienced. By all means, this does not mean that every family is doing this, so I am talking generalizations. If your family is doing something totally different: please do share.

In my family Christmas takes place on the 24th, so Christmas Eve. That is common for Germany and just alone getting used to that difference is a bit tricky for me. Not just the date is different, also the food varies greatly.

Generally, in my family we would have Chicken noodle soup for lunch, something light that will not fill you up for the supper to come. We would get together around 3.30 p.m. for cake and coffee and after that presents would be exchanged. You’ll have a break and whoever is hosting Christmas that year would start preparing for supper. What’s for supper? Whatever our host feels like.

This year I was told the menu was this

– Ragout fin (it’s a meat starter)
– potato salad and Bavarian veal sausage
– dessert (I don’t know)

I remember one Christmas my mother made a whole different thing:

– mixed salad with shrimp
– red & yellow bell pepper soup
– lobster
– dessert (I don’t recall that one but it was fancy)

You see, it really depends on the person and what they feel like. Also, it depends on how many people are coming.

Her in Canada there are two standards:

– Turkey
– Ham

With that you have mashed potatoes, veggies, corn, buns, gravy, and some sort of dessert. That’s pretty much what we’ve got last Christmas and what we had this Christmas. Actually, we had both ham and turkey but there was also a good amount of people so most of the food went.

It was delicious and our hosts (my husbands 2nd cousin and his wife) did a wonderful job on the meal. The turkey was perfect, the ham was sweet and the whole meal was just very good.

But I find it a bit repetitive if you get my meaning. There is already turkey for Thanksgiving, which is in October in Canada and it seems that turkey or ham is the “go to thing” when there are big family dinners. That seems a bit boring to me. What about fish? Or casserole? Sea food? Soup? Salad? There are so many option you could do for Christmas dinner, why doing a standard? Why not surprise you family a bit?

You might think: but that’s more work? Well, that turkey is in the oven for 3 hours, you could make a lot in three hours, what’s holding you back?

I certainly don’t want to belittle the North American Christmas Dinner tradition. As I said, I thoroughly enjoyed myself and the food was great. I’m just thinking that everyone has several cook books in their cupboard, why not put those to use?

Happy cooking!