Regional Holiday Traditions

[TetRefine]

Well its not really a regional tradition, but my family always goes to midnight mass every year. 

[Sasha Distan]

so we went "visiting" this year. i'd like to turn it into a tradition. got up to skype with ma and sis, then went back to bed for several hours. went to the farm, feed the people at the farm gingerbread, then went to the pub with my parents. turns out this makes my parents MUCH more bearable. then went to the in-laws and ate until we went into a coma. christmas sorted. i propose we do this every year.

[Uziel]

We usually attend a church service that holds between 7 and 9 am. Then we go home and have a big hearty lunch with fried chicken and goat meat(what's it called?) and lots of food. My grandmother likes to share, so we cook enough to share to all the neighbours.

This isn't spectacular, especially since we now do this every year.

[Thorn Wilde]

In Finland we eat our main Christmas meal at Christmas Eve evening. Lots of fish (no lutefisk in our table), meat, vegetable casseroles and ham.

 

My Finnish family eats fish in the evening on Christmas Eve (my uncle is the only person I know who can actually cook lutefisk and make it taste like, well, fish), and ham as a sort of daytime meal on Christmas Day. At least that's how it went the last time I was there for Christmas. I don't know if that's at all typical. 

[Suvitar]

My Finnish family eats fish in the evening on Christmas Eve (my uncle is the only person I know who can actually cook lutefisk and make it taste like, well, fish), and ham as a sort of daytime meal on Christmas Day. At least that's how it went the last time I was there for Christmas. I don't know if that's at all typical. 

 

Many families are adopting their own traditions and don´t follow the old ones very much anymore. My family has Christmas traditions that have been followed for decades. Christmas porridge at midday Christmas Eve, candles to the cemetery, dinner, presents. Christmas Day and Boxing Day we eat the same food....there´s always too much food.

[Ron]

As I was growing up, we would always have ham, sweet potatoes, baked beans and whatever green my mother wanted to cook at Christmas. For New Years Day we would have sauerkraut and pork ribs with mashed potatoes and again whatever greens were available. Everything was delicious and hearty and oh so filling that we'd all end up practically comatose, sleeping the meal off between bouts of TV when we could stay awake.

 

My partner doesn't like ham, so over the past eighteen plus years we have cooked various hoof and fowl. This year it was brisket smothered in tomatoes/onions - slow cooked for hours, and steamed potatoes - butter/chopped parsley, and carrots. We washed it down with a very nice Zinfandel. Yummy! Sauerkraut and pork ribs has still been on the menu for New Years continuously and that's fine with me.

 

One new thing that I did this year was to decorate the tree without lights. The tree is in our windowed oriel and it's fine during the day but at night, not so much. If circumstances require a tree next year there will be lighting.

[Kitt]

The traditions in my family have stayed pretty much the same although greatly downsized over the years as the family is greatly reduced and very scattered now.

 

The party started Thanksgiving weekend. My uncle grew Christmas trees for wholesale and Thanksgiving was harvest weekend. We would all drive up to his farm in Pennsylvania on Wednesday. Gram and mom would cook while the rest of us were in the fields as soon as it was warm enough to bale the trees without cracking branches. The traditional Italian meal ( at least my families version ) would start around noonish with pasta, meatballs, bracolli ( a sort of meat roll browned then simmered in the tomato sauce, no i didn't misspell the veggie. I am not sure I spelled the meat roll right lol), sausages, and salad.  Then back out to the fields for more tree cutting/baling while dishes were done and more big cooking, and dinner was the usual Turkey, stuffing,potatoes, turnips, cranberry sauce, salad, etc. We did eventually split the two huge meal sections to dinner on Thurs and Friday and cut back to soup and sandwiches at lunch time.  We would have anywhere from 10 to 20 people staying there for the weekend. If harvest went well and we had time the guys headed off to the gun shop for an afternoon of drooling while the gals headed into town and started Christmas shopping. His farm was also the destination for the great migration another one mentioned and as most of us filtered out over the day Sunday, more would filter in for opening deer season on Monday.

 

Various groupings of these same 10 to 20 people got together every weekend to decorate and shop thru December.

 

Christmas eve was a big thing with the traditional pasta with seven types of fish at grams house, but we only whistle stopped there as we spent most of the eve with dad's great grams.  That was another huge gathering of all the cousins aunts and uncles usually totaling about 30 or so if everyone came. Food was sort of pot luck with every mom bringing something from lasagna from us to baked beans and anything you can think of in between. Midnight mass was followed by opening presents ( we usually needed to wake the younger ones up!)

 

Christmas day was just as crazy at mom's family. The same huge dinner ( pasta plus turkey) started around 10 am with an antipasto and was basically non-stop rotations of eating, visiting and dishes, with breaks for football in between. Gram was oldest of 12 and gramps was oldest of 13 so don't ask me how many aunts uncles and cousins were in and out all day!  Boxing day was spent napping and cleaning up! 

 

Now we are much fewer since the days of 12 kids are long gone, and most of us remaining are scattered to the winds, but I still try to do the traditional foods and collect as many relatives as I can here around the holidays. Now the turkey gets lots of plates made and frozen for reheated meals and pasta dishes are much smaller but I still make the pasta with fish, just lots less of it.

 

We did add the skype visit with Sasha this year that I hope will continue for a long time. It was a great idea and i am currently trying to catch all the out of state relatives to see if we can set up something similar with all the relatives that cant travel! 

Edited December 29, 2013 by Kitt

[Sasha Distan]

We did add the skype visit with Sasha this year that I hope will continue for a long time. It was a great idea and i am currently trying to catch all the out of state relatives to see if we can set up something similar with all the relatives that cant travel! 

 

Keep me away, I dare ya! 

[mickey1952]

It is initially an American thing, but it's become quite popular Christmas food in the UK as well. In Scandinavia, not so much. In my area, pork is common. In Western Norway they eat mutton. Up North lots of people eat fish. And then there's different parts of the animal as well. In Norway we tend to use the ribs, while in Sweden and Finland it's more common to eat ham, if I'm not very much mistaken. Pork has traditionally been common because pigs were easy to keep, since they eat whatever they get, and there's a lot of food on one well-fed pig. 

 

Then there is, of course, the tradition of Lutefisk, but we don't need to talk about that... Bleh.

 

Yesterday, I cooked a Christmas goose, which used to be traditional Christmas food in England, pre-turkey, for our dinner party, stuffed with apples, bread, black currants and thyme. It was very tasty. We served it with buttersteamed sugar snap peas, oven grilled potatoes (cooked in the goose fat), parsnip puree and black currant and wine sauce.

The U.S. has it's share of disgusting foods, for sure. But I just googled lutefish, and if a particular dish ever deserved a place on the Top 20 "I think I'm gonna be sick!" list of foods, this one seems to be a shoe-in!

[Aditus]

There's isn't enough ketchup, chili sauce and garlic for this.

[Zombie]

yum yum, sounds delicious...

 

... compared with surströmming

[Thorn Wilde]

Surströmming is actually quite tasty. It just smells really strong. You never eat it indoors. There are other ways to pickle herring that are less time consuming and demanding, though.

 

Lutefisk is kind of a misunderstood dish. Like many other old traditional 'delicacies', we've forgotten why it's made that way. In this case, it was a question of preserving the fish in lye to make it last longer. Prior to cooking you're supposed to water it out. Many modern people seem to have forgotten that. They only water it out for a little bit, and then they think it's supposed to be all jelly-like. It isn't. You treat it properly and it tastes like, well, cod. Which it is. Of course, in this day and age you might as well just cook cod. 

[Zombie]

I'll take you word for it - even though according to the German food critic, Wolfgang Fassbender, "the biggest challenge when eating surströmming is to vomit only after the first bite... rather than before"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Edited January 31, 2014 by Zombie

[comicfan]

When mom was alive Christmas was an event. The house and tree were decorated the first weekend that came after the 8th of December. (Mom wasn't sure when I would arrive so they set up the Christmas tree on Thanksgiving evening and by Christmas my mother couldn't take it any more. After that it was put up after my birthday. ) That night Christmas music would play and every inch of the house seemed to get decked out. In my basement now are nine boxes of ornaments. When I say boxes I mean this suckers are huge. Doesn't include the rest of the decorating stuff. After the tree was done and the inside then the outside was decked out too. Lights on the trees, light up Santa, and a bunch of other things. I had moved away and once Mom passed, Dad got rid of everything for the yard. He has a small decorated tree that is about a foot tall he uses. Nothing else is done now.

 

The food used to be cooked in advance. Mom liked to have a buffet style for Christmas eve and Christmas. Turkey, Ham, and all sorts of salads. Now it is whatever Dad wants, I cook for him. The big holiday is over. As he constantly reminds me, I'm single with no children so no real reason to celebrate. I still send my cards and happily hang up any I get on the card wreath my mother had. not much any more but that is Christmas.

[lovesickpuppy]

When mom was alive Christmas was an event. The house and tree were decorated the first weekend that came after the 8th of December. (Mom wasn't sure when I would arrive so they set up the Christmas tree on Thanksgiving evening and by Christmas my mother couldn't take it any more. After that it was put up after my birthday. ) That night Christmas music would play and every inch of the house seemed to get decked out. In my basement now are nine boxes of ornaments. When I say boxes I mean this suckers are huge. Doesn't include the rest of the decorating stuff. After the tree was done and the inside then the outside was decked out too. Lights on the trees, light up Santa, and a bunch of other things. I had moved away and once Mom passed, Dad got rid of everything for the yard. He has a small decorated tree that is about a foot tall he uses. Nothing else is done now.

 

The food used to be cooked in advance. Mom liked to have a buffet style for Christmas eve and Christmas. Turkey, Ham, and all sorts of salads. Now it is whatever Dad wants, I cook for him. The big holiday is over. As he constantly reminds me, I'm single with no children so no real reason to celebrate. I still send my cards and happily hang up any I get on the card wreath my mother had. not much any more but that is Christmas.

 

 

Have you thought about doing new traditions? I think that's what I'm going to work on.

[Kitt]

Have you thought about doing new traditions? I think that's what I'm going to work on.

This is an idea I like. I am shooting for a gathering of friends etc on the weekend between the two holidays. I may not have enough family around to cook big for any more, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't build a new one!

[mickey1952]

I don't do anything with family anymore. My siblings all have their own kids and grandkids to deal with, but about a dozen or so friends and I get together on Christmas Day and have our own holiday feast. All the traditional foods and such. We've carved out a sort of "new" family with each other for the holidays.