When I was growing up (Central NY), Christmas Dinner was always around 3pm and each of us had our own stuffed Cornish game hen. With mashed potatoes, gravy & the typical other side dishes. Yum!
Now, Christmas is spent with my husband’s family (Thanksgiving with my family).
So we go to his aunt’s hours around 11am, where the big family gathering is, and open presents and have dinner at 1pm - always turkey & ham, with the typical fixings. Then we go to his mom’s house where his stepdad will have prepared a scrumptious dinner of whatever met his fancy that year. Prime rib, or lobster, or lasagne, whatever he fixes, it’s always good!
So we get two Chrismas dinners. One at 1 and another at 4.
In general, yes. Each employer gets to set his own policies, but it’s pretty common to have the 25th off (if you’re lucky, when the 25th falls on a Saturday or Sunday your employer will give you the 24th or the 26th off instead), and be expected back at work on the next business day following the 25th. Some employers are extra generous and when the 25th is on a Thursday or Tuesday give you the intervening Friday or Monday as a holiday, too, but many are not that generous.
Same pattern with January 1 as a holiday.
If you want additional time off, you’re expected to use vacation time.
I’m not much of a card sender, but I think they tend to have pictures of Xmas trees, bells, Santa, Nativity scenes (from those rare religious breed of folk) and other generica. I’m sure the occasional winter scene is sent around, but I’d hope the sender was being achingly ironic, rather than just plain stupid.
Oh, there’s also Santa on his surfboard and Santa roasting on the beach. All naff, to steal an English turn of phrase.
The traditional danish christmas dinner consists of either roast pork with crisp crackling, roast duck or roast goose, with sweet and sour red cabbage on the side, served with white or/and sugarglazed potatoes. The gravy is based on the juices from the roast. If the main course if duck or goose it is stuffed with apples and de-stoned prunes. Sidedishes include redcurrant jam, pickled cucumber and, in my family, waldorf salad (mmmm)(apples, walnuts, celery and grapes in sour cream with a little sugar).
The traditional danish dessert is called ris à l’amande, which is rice boiled in milk, mixed with whipped cream, egg yolks and vanilla. It is served cold, with hot cherry sauce. It’s usually filled with chopped almonds and one whole almond. Whoever gets the almond, gets the special gift.
Christmas will be pretty traditional this year. Mmmm, drooling already.
[QUOTE=owlstretchingtime] jervoise (and other antipodeans etc…
Do you send each other cards with snowmen, winterscenes, robins etc on them? If not what do you have on your cards?
QUOTE]
Our Christmas cards had 1) Santa surfing and 2) Santa sitting out in a desert around a campfire with a Billy of tea. He’s surrounded by a kangaroo, an echidna, a wombat, and a cockatoo, and they all have a little gift. I did see cards with penguins and snowmen.
What I think is funny is that people have plastic snowmen sitting out in their yards. Also, Channel Seven has a series of Christmas commercials out now that have all the on-air personalities singing Christmas songs. At least one of them has them singing “Let it Snow” and all of them have fake snow falling down. Hysterical. It’s like a gazillion frickin’ degrees out.
Like Jervoise said, I think my Christmas dinner is going to consist of cold meats and salads…unless I rebel and serve up my American Christmas dinner, which consists of baked ham, scalloped potatoes, assorted cooked veggies, hot rolls, and Christmas cookies. In my family, the Christmas Eve tradition is to have lots of seafood (scallops, snow crab legs, shrimp), and a take-out pizza (and lots of Christmas cookies). Maybe I’ll at least keep that tradition. Mmmmmmm…Christmas cookies.
We generally have a Christmas lunch, rather than a dinner, but it’s all fairly flexible. It just depends on who’s turning up and what time they will arrive. For food, it’s fairly standard Australian Christmas fare - cold meats (ham, turkey, beef), salads, and **LOTS ** of seafood (oysters, prawns, lobster). We usually finish with a traditional warm Christmas pudding, just to keep my father happy. After the lunch we all go for a walk, or play a round of golf, or have a fiercely fought game of backyard cricket.
Boxing day is also usually spent in the traditional Australian manner - slumped in front of the television set flicking channels between the opening day’s play in the cricket test in Melbourne and the start of the Sydney to Hobart yacht race.
I’m in California, transplanted from the upper midwest. We generally have a beef rib roast and Yorkshire pudding, with creamed spinach on the side. When my Canadian/Scottish grandmother was around, we would have plum pudding or mince pie with hard sauce. Now we have whatever sounds good at the time for dessert. We used to have a tradition of oysters as an appetizer, but that has kind of died out since little kids appeared on the scene. Possibly it will get revived someday.
Being in Australia, as others have said, it’s hot on Christmas day.
My parents have a big veranda out the back, and we usually spit roast some beef, BBQ some prawns and chicken drumlets, plain old snags for the kids. We also serve a leg of ham on the bone (cold), and often some cold roast chicken. We then have more salads than you can poke a stick at - a recent favourite has been a bok choi salad that mum makes.
For desert, we have an ice-cream christmas pudding, plus trifle, pavlova and a lot of fresh fruit, since berries are in season and just divine. My dad’s godmother usually brings mince pies, but she’s 96, and this year I don’t think she’ll manage to make any.
We sit around outside, with a glass of chardy (or beer or whatever), and it’s lovely. Around 3 or 4pm, backyard cricket usually begins.
My grandparents live near the beach, so when we have Christmas at their place, lunch is usually followed by a walk on the beach. Often beach cricket is involved.
Here in our corner of southern california we have tamales, beans, and rice with a green salad. The tamales have to be spiced shredded beef with a green olive, strip of green chile and slice of potato. The corn husks must be rolled around the masa and filling and then tied on the ends, sort of like tootsie rolls (if you fold them, that’s lazy and you don’t get as much). Then you steam them for a bit.
Champurrado to drink, which is really thick hot chocolate made with tortilla flour, brown sugar, and cinnamon. Then bunuelos for dessert; imagine fried flour tortillas dipped in cinnamon sugar.
My family always did turkey for thanksgiving and then anything but turkey for christmas. Generally, we’d pick a country and have our favorite dishes. For the last decade we’ve switched to tamales and have been very happy. I’m drooling right now, in fact.
owlstretchingtime pretty much summed up the norm here in England; turkey with all the trimmings.
This year I thought I’d try a goose though (which was popular before turkey came on the scene). Last year I strayed rather further from the conventional and cooked a barbecue (think about it… a clear, crisp winter’s day IS the right time to be sitting right next to a brazier full of glowing charcoal).
You are the wife of Henry Hill from Goodfellas and I claim my five pounds!
Baked beans? - This must mean something different in america (In england baked beans are a ubiquitous cheap tinned bean in a sweet tomato sauce beloved of kids, students and single blokes, we eat them on toast. Supermarkets sell 'em as a loss leader at about 10p (15 cents) a tin).
That’s not what we’re having, that’s what’s traditional 'round these parts.
Seriously.
In what I think has to be the greatest single piece of Evil Marketing™, when KFC first arrived in Japan, they managed to single-handedly convince a nation of 100 million+ people that the traditional Christmas dinner was fried chicken. Specifically, Kentucky Fried Chicken. You actually need to make a reservation at KFC several days in advance if you want to buy anything there during the week of the 25th.
Still, the life-size statues of Col. Sanders dressed as Santa are kinda cute.
Well, there are Christmas cakes (which I think were thought up by one of the candy companies), but for the most part Christmas is a time for couples to go out for dinner, then party. New Year’s, OTOH, is when families get together and have traditional dishes.
pssst, Jervoise, I found out recently that the pav isn’t as Australian as most of us think. It’s another thing we stole from NZ, so I hope no kiwis read your post!
As other Aussies have pointed out, there’s a fair bit of variety over here, with no one traditional meal standing out. My grandparents always had the trad English hot meal, as I think quite a few of that generation did.
Our Xmas tradition? Breakfast at the in-laws: Ham off the bone, with croissants and boiled eggs, plus orange juice (champagne optional) Lunch at my parent’s house: Lashings of seafood and several salads (garden, potato, plus some new gourmet salad Mum’s trying this year).
Then we retire to the beach for a few hours.
Home and too full to eat dinner
When my dad was married to his second wife, we always did the traditional Christmas dinner of turkey or ham plus all the sides. It was like a repeat of Thanksgiving (family fighting included). Since I have been on my own I have made Christmas dinner for the family exactly one time. ONCE. NEVER AGAIN. I cooked for about 35 people and made a goose, some cornish hens, pesto mashed potatoes, straw pasta, winter pear salad w/raspberry viniagrette(sp?), marinated olive salad, lemon brussel sprouts, and hibiscus cooler punch. My fiance’s family brought a ham and various pies and those are the only things they would touch so my family devoured all the goodies I had made. Now that I no longer have that fiance or a house big enough to fit everyone, I am back to going to dad’s house for the holidays. He is on his third marriage and everyone is much happier for it so tradition has gone out the window. Holiday meals consist of much beer and whatever we feel like fixing. Last year we made trays of enchiladas and I think this year it will be roast beef sammiches (minus the fighting).
I have no idea what is traditional for the goyim in Northern California, but we go by my wife’s family tradition, which covers two days and several meals.
Christmas Eve we have a roast. Christmas morning we start with butterhorn crescents (called by my kids butterhorn presents when they were little) which is a pastry sometimes with cinnamon and always iced. Then, while unwrapping presents (which takes > 6 hours at our house) we have a snack of shrimp, cheese, potato chips, crackers, pepperoni, salami, and champagne. Then about 3 we have a big turkey with peas, mashed potatoes, corn frozen during the summer, and baked beans. We often have a rum pie for desert. Then, after finishing opening the presents, we have leftovers.
