In my mom’s house, you wake up Christmas morning to the glorious smell of baking ham, that Santa has been kind enough to put in the oven in the middle of the night. Breakfast is fresh hot ham slices on buttered toast. Mmmmmmm
Lunch is typical southern… Ham, potato salad, deviled eggs, salad - along with banana nut bread, applesauce spice bread, and all the fudge you can stand.
Dinner for Hubby and I is chinese take-out picked up on the way home.
We have a mixed ethnic background in our marriage, so we pay homage to both during Christmas.
On Christmas Eve, my in-laws come here, and since we’re none of us big turkey fans and the WryGuy will not eat ham, I make a pork loin roast. It is served with scalloped apples-and-cranberries, 2 veggies (not sure yet which ones, but corn is usually one of 'em), rolls and butter. My sister-in-law and my niece are vegetarian all year but eat fish during the holidays, so I am making shrimp scampi for them. Sis-in-law will bring her unbelievably creamy garlic mashed potatoes, Mother-in-law is bringing a green salad and the two maiden aunts are bringing cheesecake.
My family is “old-country” Italian, so it’s traditionally been a seafood and pasta meal, but my Mom has finally caught on that none of her children like stuffed calamari in the spaghetti sauce. Mom still serves raw clams, shrimp and crab legs though. We also have gnocchi (with marinara sauce.) Dessert is a gigantic fruit tray with pomegranates, figs, tangerines, dates and an assortment of nuts, along with biscotti and espresso.
Christmas at home has always been a Thanksgiving repeat:
Turkey with bread stuffing, mashed potatos, corn, sweet potatos, gravy, cranberry relish, rolls, and potica for dessert.
Since I’ve been in control of my destiny, Christmas dinner is ham (preferably Honey-Baked brand or close facsimile), potato-cheese pierogis, artichokes or asparagus with Hollandaise sauce, rolls, corn and Christmas cookies for dessert, although if potica is available, I’m there. Oh, and pumpkin pie for the boychild (he doesn’t share).
Christmas starts early with coffee and muffins and cookies and brownies and we snack and chat and do presents and stuff…
Lunch is buffet style so we can go back to chatting and presents and stuff. I make lasagna and meatballs and garlic bread.
We have a revolving door on Christmas day as relatives come and go at their own pace as they balance their visit to our house with commitments elsewhere. So whatever time you’re here make up a plate and join in the fun 
My sis-in-law always serves Gumbo for Christmas dinner.
Christmas Eve my family gets take out Chinese and watches Die Hard, then goes to midnight mass (even though my mom’s the only religious one in the house).
Christmas Day is different every year. Sometimes lasagna, sometimes a roast, sometimes lamb, whatever. But we always have a nice brunch with friends on Christmas morning, with these great apricot coffee cakes and cookies and all sorts of other delicious goodies.
Hokkaido Brit, goose is actually the traditional UK dish, not turkey.
I go to my parents and we have a huge multi-course feast on Christmas Eve - often saddle of lamb for the main course but always some prime cut and roast potatoes and a full range of vegetables.
We probably won’t have them ON Christmas, but sometime around the holiday we will have tamales
This is a Mexican tradition. And although we are not of Mexican decent, our heritage is Mexican. My grandfather even served (conscripted) in the Federalese’ to fight Pancho Villa. Mom has been known to make her own tamales, but I think we will just buy them this year.
[sub]Note: About a week ago we bought some Tamales from El Pollo Loco and my family said they were not “real” tamales since they did not have potato or green beans in them. Mexicans are really good at adding fillers to their tamales [/sub]
Christmas Eve is the big night for tradition for my family. We have an old-world Hungarian Christmas feast which consists of:
mushroom soup with sauerkraut and noodles
salad with endive
made-from-scratch challah bread
fried and/or baked fish (this year it will be perch taken straight outta Lake Erie - we like to live dangerously)
Every thing we eat at the table has significance relating to the night the Baby Jesus was born. My Very Catholic grandma used to quiz us all before we could open our presents. Part of the tradition that we never did as long as I can remember is to put hay under the table, to signify the stable where Mary and Joseph had to stay. Kinda hard to find hay in the city I guess.
then after presents are open, we eat all the cookies we can stuff ourselves with!!! mmmmmmm
Christmas eve tradition in our house is takeout Chinese; we’re usually doing so many last minute preparation things that it just is easier that way. Christmas day is my wife’s awesome coffee cake, egg bake and lotsa coffee and mimosas. We skip lunch, but dinner has been roasted rack of lamb, roasted baby potatoes, rolls, fresh steamed asparagus and corn. Dessert? Cheesecake of course. And plenty o’ adult beverages tow ash things down with.
If I’m at my dad’s we all drink as much as possible while my stepmom runs around freaking out over dinner. Eventually it is served, at which point my stepmom gets drunk. Wacky hijinks ensue.
If I’m with my mom’s side of the family, we all cooperate drinking as much as possible and cooking dinner. It’s quite pleasant, unless you happen to be underage, in which case it is boring.
The food’s usually good…
Wow, my stomach is growling (LOL) just reading about all these Christmas food traditions! It all sounds so good too, especially reading about different ethnic traditions; it’s only been in recent years that I’d heard about the 12 fishes dinner on Christmas Eve. My family has been here on my Dad’s side since mid-17th century but came from England; on Mom’s side since mid-18th century to mid-19th, from England/Scotland/Ireland & Wales. Dad’s from Virginia, and the traditional meal there usually centers around ham and biscuits along with lots of fried chicken and potato salad. His parents would usually send us a country ham at Christmas time, one that had to be soaked overnight before it could be boiled, and I was always anxiously waiting to have it sliced on biscuits. Mom’s family traditionally had turkey and all the trimmings, although from time to time we would have roast beef which Mom fixed Yorkshire pudding to go with. That is what I’ve made my traditional Christmas meal–roast beef, and I’m hoping to be able to get a (small) standing rib roast without having to pay too much for it. I probably won’t make the Yorkshire pudding (although I’d love to have it, it’s just -too- much cholesterol with the roast beef!), but we will have mashed potatoes or maybe scalloped potatoes, green peas & pearl onions, fresh baked rolls and apple and pumpkin pies for dessert. And maybe a pecan pie for my son, who loves them.
My Dad has sent me a half of a country ham this year and I’ll probably cook that up a few nights before Christmas so we’ll have that to nibble off of. We’ll have a small turkey too, for Christmas Day, with all the usual trimmings. I think I may make cranberry-orange sauce this year. I haven’t started baking any cookies yet, but will have some baked this year; probably not as many as usual, though–last year, they didn’t get eaten! My SO has diabetes, so it’s just as well.
I used to do that too, but it was just exhausting. Now I do a Pacific Northwest thing:
Dungeness crab
spinach salad
roast garlic potatos
cranberry relish
marionberry pie
We generally have a standing rib roast and Yorkshire pudding. Apparently this is not the traditional English dinner I always assumed it was.
Is there any time when it is traditional in England to have roast beef and Yorkshire pudding?
I’m Italian, obviously, which means, obviously, we have pasta. Lots of pasta.
But----and this is reallly the weird part----we also have nine different types of fish. EVERY year. Some bizarre tradition, don’t ask.
erm not where I am from - occasional Sunday lunch for the ems UK household.
For Christmas lunch around 2.00pm ish we have turkey and trimmings which includes sausage meat, bacon cooked on the turkey breast, mam’s own recipe bread ‘n’ onion stuffing, steamed new potatoes (from our garden that summer), roast potatoes, brussel sprouts, peas and broad beans (both from our garden in the summer), yorkshire pudding (because me and my sister whinge if we don’t get them) and turkey gravy.
For dinner - if we can eat anything after stuffing our faces with candy & nuts all afternoon - we have warmed homemade bread and cooked ham that my mam cooks on Christmas Eve plus cheese and crackers and other assorted buffet style items as this is generally when we get out visitors.
This year as I am away from home again my mam is freezing me some Christmas turkey and ham which I will eat in the summer when I get home. 
We used to have a big turkey and trimmings dinner on Christmas eve, which is when we celebrate. However, when my niece and nephew were young, it used to drive my mother crazy that she had done all this cooking, and all the kids wanted to do was eat some rolls with butter and open presents. My mother’s pissiness drove me crazy, so for several years, we had the only thing I could cook–chili, which is pretty amusing since we are of German heritage. I didn’t give a damn if the kids ate it or not, so it worked out fine. Now that they have grown up, we have reverted to turkey, but since both my niece and my nephew’s wife are pregnant, I see more chili in our future.
We usually have a BBQ with prawns, spit roast beef, chicken drumettes etc. Plus a big cold ham, and more salad than you can poke a stick at. In a nod to tradition we have christmas pudding and mince pies for dessert, but we usually also have fruit salad.
oh I forgot about breakfast. Mom would make scrambled eggs and ham, pancackes and bacon, and I’d make cinnamon rolls. of course we weren’t hungry until dinnertime. For dessert it would be cheesecake and chocolate pudding pie.
ahh, the holidays.