My wife and I had leftover chili for dinner on Christmas.
For the family’s Christmukkah luncheon, we got together at a Chinese restaurant of one of my (half-Chinese and always looking for the most authentic food) BiL’s choosing. Thankfully the main roads were cleared and the temps were in the teens rather than the negative teens. The place was absolutely mobbed when we arrived, but BiL made reservations. BiL ordered the best food for us, and the revolving bowls in our cozy dining nook was very festive.
We don’t have any decent places near us that are open for Christmas. We tied a Chinese restaurant one year and it was terrible. We have decided to travel next year and avoid the stress of the holiday. Maybe Hawaii.
But this year we had turkey and ham at home
Lunch with my family was our annual Chinese buffet at an excellent place nearby. They really pull out all the stops on Xmas and have dishes they don’t ordinarily have.
Late afternoon was hors d’oeuvres/snacks at the ex-inlaws.
Dinner was a private meal with 14 friends at a smallish Indian restaurant which we’d reserved - we were their only diners, though they were doing a fair amount of take-out orders.
Jewish, and from a family of origin that only infrequently went to restaurants. Christmas wasn’t anything special except when I lived with a Christian and now that I’m married to a Yule-celebrator of Christian origin. I’ve never eaten other than at home or a family member’s house for Christmas Eve or Day.
I live alone, but I do cook a bit. I usually make the effort to make a nice dinner for myself on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Last night it was ham, potatoes au gratin, green beans, and sparkling cider. I’ll have leftovers for several days, and bean-and-ham soup and freeze most of it. I’ll probably finish it off in February.
At least that was the plan. I ordered a bone-in ham, but they may have given me boneless by mistake. Not sure what I’ll do for soup.
My wife and I took a train from Boston to NYC, met some friends who came up from DC on the train, and saw a matinee of Joel Grey’s Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish. Having dinner at a kosher Chinese restaurant was essentially mandatory. (Yes, we’re Jewish.)
Dinner was okay, but not great. (I don’t know about you, but I’ve rarely found a kosher Chinese restaurant that was as good as a better-than-average treif Chinese restaurant.)
We usually observe the traditional Jewish custom of going out for Chinese food and a movie, but this year it was too cold so we ordered in Pakistani. It was delicious.
It is so common for Jews in the northeast (Philly, NY, Boston) to go to a Chinese restaurant on Christmas day that it has become the subject of jokes. After all, it is not a holiday for either of us. In fact, I suggested as a joke that we go to our favorite Chinese restaurant, although the weather was so lousy I had no intention of going out. In fact my wife cooked sheetpan swordfish with zucchini, potatoes and corn. It was delicious and we had the leftovers today. But it is not particularly special.
Over the last couple of years our entire family has left us alone in SoCal (except for one nephew who flew up to the Seattle area to celebrate with the rest of the family). So, we had spaghetti bolognese with a Marie Callendar’s double lemon cream pie. Yum!
The only time I’ve eaten in a restaurant for Christmas was one time when I was about 10 or 11. My grandmother didn’t want to cook and took us all out to the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica. It was when I became notorious in the family, because I ordered lobster. Well, they said order whatever you want, I’d never had lobster, and wanted to try it. I loved it!
We did dinner at (husband’s) Grandma’s this year, which is a catered thing with a big family… there were probably about 50 of us. It’s good food. I ate prime rib and scalloped potatoes and pretended I was going to eat steamed broccoli.
Although I was raised Jewish, I have literally never once gone for Chinese food on Christmas. Now I am married to a heretic of Christian origin, but we have been quite COVID-cautious (and this year I was recovering from COVID on Christmas), so no indoor dining for us. Luckily before I got sick, we had enough foresight to buy a Cryovac-ed rack of lamb, which Tom Scud prepped simply last night: salt, pepper, olive oil, and dried rosemary from the garden, browned and then roasted in a cast-iron skillet, with Hasselback potatoes. And I had talked him into a small grocery run on Saturday (the Korean supermarket near our house, because it was less likely to be a clusterfuck than most), so he picked up some oyster mushrooms, and we already had some green beans and a bottle of Malbec. Simple, but tasty.
I had made Swedish pancakes for breakfast; not as elaborate a breakfast as I would have done normally, but it was all I could manage energy-wise, and I needed to spend the rest of the morning horizontal after that to recover. COVID: still worth avoiding, even if you’re fully vaxed and boosted. I basically missed an entire week of work because the least effort required a multi-hour nap afterward. Hopefully this week will be an improvement, because I am just about out of PTO.
I’ve eaten a LOT of Christmas meals on the road for work. Sometimes a mid-day buffet feast at one of our hubs while passing through. Sometimes it’s a power bar from my emergency ration stash in my suitcase because there’s nothing open near the hotel and they closed their food service at 2pm whereas we got there at 5pm or later. Sometimes it’s typical hotel restaurant fare or prefab box lunches they prepared for their late arrivals before closing the kitchen mid-afternoon. But on average, it’s a pretty bleak experience.
One year we pulled into LGA at ~7pm on Christmas day. Dark, cold, breezy, and snowing lightly but steadily. Our hotel was in the predominantly Jewish area between LGA & JFK, and we were crestfallen to learn they’d closed the kitchen hours ago; not even a stale sandwich to be had. Crap. So off we went hiking the few blocks through the snow to the desk clerk’s recommendation. Yep, a Kosher Chinese place on the main commercial boulevard. Literally the only place open for blocks, and this was decades before mobile phones, much less Uber.
The Chinese proprietors eyed we three goy men up & down suspiciously but decided we wouldn’t offend the rather Orthodox clientele too much if they stuck us in the booth by the kitchen. The food was wonderful, everybody there seemed to be having a fine time, and the hike back to the dismal hotel was much better with full bellies & mere flurries.
What started out with auguries of a particularly disappointing Christmas evening turned out to be one of the more memorable and tasty ones.
Fast forward to today. That was my one and only Chinese Christmas dinner. I’ll be retired by next Christmas, so if I ever do another one it’ll be voluntary and with family, not cow-orkers. If my dinner-mates of yore are still alive they’d be in their middle-late 80s by now. Wonder what ever happened to them?
Off-topic anecdote about having more holiday food than you can finish:
2014 was Kayla’s first Thanksgiving on her own. She and a group of her college friends (about a dozen, all told) made plans to feast a Carmine’s Restaurant in Times Square. One of the friends is a scion of the family that owns the restaurant, so the $400 or so for the feast (link goes to Facebook) was going to be covered. Pretty sweet, right?
Well, about a week or so before Thanksgiving, the party began to dwindle. Freshman girls were deciding that they’d rather fly home and spend the holiday with family. On the day of, Kayla and the Carmine’s girl were what was left of the party. The girl called her dad, and he told her to go ahead and order the feast, but bring some leftovers to her sister, a few blocks away.
So Kayla and her buddy are sitting in the front window of this fancy Italian restaurant, obviously the only people at this huge table full of food (the link will list what was on it), while people walked past, staring inside. At the end of the meal, they had everything boxed up and had to schlep it twelve blocks to a deluxe apartment in the sky.
The story was enough recompense for not being able to have the holiday with us.
Robot_Arm, if there’s a Honeybaked Ham Store anywhere reachable for you, they make sandwiches, and sell the ham bones at a reasonable price (I’m only mentioning the sandwiches to explain why they have ham bones for sale).
The only time we’ve eaten out for Christmas is if we’re travelling. So we’ve had Christmas dinner on Vancouver Island (hotel buffet), in Cuba (hotel buffet), in Paris (Grand Colbert) and in Prague (take-away from the Wenceslas Square market).
Since we were home yesterday, we had traditional: turkey dinner, leek and onion stuffing, mashed potatoes, roasted butternut squash, and roasted brussel sprouts with a maple syrup topping. Never got to anything for afters, because we were stuffed.
My family cooks. The host/ess does the turkey or ham, and the potatoes. Everyone else brings side dishes and desserts. There’s always enough to take home an extra meal. I love it this way. And if someone has to work( we have nurses in the family) we make a meal and it’s delivered to them.
There are two of us, and we don’t socialize for holidays, so it’s always just us; and I don’t do the cooking.
I don’t like going to restaurants on major eating holidays, like Thanksgiving or Christmas, because the nicer restaurants all seem to do prix fixe meals, and they churn the customers like a factory turning out cardboard boxes. No matter how good the food might taste, I can’t enjoy it.
We used to out on Christmas Eve instead, just as festive, but usually with a regular menu and regular relaxed service. There was one place which became our special occasion destination, always excellent food, service, and atmosphere. But then came Covid, and the owners apparently sold the place (and took some of the décor with them) and the new owners just don’t do things as well, not from lack of experience but from a different outlook. We ate there a few months ago, and were sadly disappointed. So this year we stayed in, and my husband cooked a lovely meal, still on Christmas Eve.
I’m hoping to find a new special occasion restaurant – we’ve lost two in the last 10 years (the other one closed before Covid). I get to assuage my guilt over not cooking by buying a big expensive meal a couple of times a year. But my husband doesn’t seem to want to try anyplace new, which makes it difficult.
I cooked, then dropped two of the three pork chops on the filthy kitchen floor. No 3-Second Rule around here. It’s history before it even hits the floor.
The place was absolutely mobbed when we arrived, but BiL made reservations. BiL ordered the best food for us, and the revolving bowls in our cozy dining nook was very festive.