It has become fairly traditional in our family to have turkey on Thanksgiving and roast beef on Christmas, so this year I’ll get the biggest rib roast I can find and make oven roasted potatoes and yorkshire pudding, just like Mom used to make. My parents are (or were) Australian, but I was born in West Virginia.
We’ll sit down to eat around 2pm, then watch some movies (probably Star Wars) and just veg.
Our Christmas Eve meal will be lasagna.
My family has a semi-southern thing going for Christmas usually, sort of traditional for Ky. We always have a country ham (salt cured and smoked for at least nine to twelve months and soaked for three days before baking) along with a pickled peach gelatin mold which is a lot tastier than it sounds and perfectly accompanies salty ham. Usually there’s a corn pudding, three bean salad, some form of sweet potatoes, and cranberries also. My aunt used to do a rum cake but after she’d gone my sister took it over and makes a Southern Comfort cake instead. I sometimes do an english pudding if I have the time. (Great recipe by the way.) I introduced the crackers a few years ago and everyone likes them so we keep up that tradition. Silly hats and all. We used to do a dinner on Christmas eve at my aunt’s place then a Christmas day dinner at our house when I was a kid. My brother, the chef, and I have kept up this tradition pretty well so far but I think it’s going to be just one potluck this year as we both have to work.
Growing up Sicilian Style:
Christmas Eve is seafood/no meat! Traditional is Pasta con Sarde (bucatelli pasta with a fresh sardine, fennel, anchovy, currant, and pignoli sauce - no cheese on this! - instead: toasted bread crumbs). An acquired taste, so usually an alternate pasta is prepared too: Red crab or clam sauce.
An assortment of hot and cold seafood: Octopus salad, shrimp (hot or cold, or both!), fried calamari with hot sauce, whatever looked good at the fishmarket…
Plus: Fried zucchini and cauliflower, homemade caponata (eggplant), pannelles (a chick-pea pancake), stuffed cherry peppers, stuffed mushrooms, green salad.
Then expresso, sambuca, pastries, fruit, nuts.
After midnight tradition: Some go to midnight mass. Some stay home to prepare for their return, and the arrival of yet more visitors, which means more food:
Sausage rolls, calzones, and zeppoles. And Snowballs (gin or vodka, white creme de cacao, heavy cream, and seltzer or seven-up). Plus whatever guests bring with them…
Christmas Day is Homemade Pasta Day - either manicotti, lasagne or ravioli.
Then some kind of roasted meat. Saute peas with mushrooms. Panzarotti (potato croquettes). Stuffed artichokes. Green salad.
Expresso, sambuca, pastries, fruit, nuts.
Wine with everything on both days - homemade, of course.
Xmas day is usually a buffet at whatever relative’s we go to. We do our fancy sit down on Xmas Eve:
A traditional Slovak saurkraut and mushroom soup with egg noodles (delicious, this is the only time I’ll ever eat kraut. )
Ham
Homemade pierogies
I’m getting hungry just thinking about it!
Hm, since my whole family is Korean, all of our relatives get together at my house and we usually have Korean barbeque, tofu, kimchi, rice, and lots of other Korean goodies. We usually eat on Christmas day at 5 or 6-ish.
Most people around here think of having turkey as part of the tradional Christmas dinner, much like Thanksgiving. Ham is also popular. In the past couple years my family has had prime rib and baked potatoes at Christmas because it comes so close after Thanksgiving. Everyone in the family welcomed this alternative, so we’re doing it again this year.
What’s a “Cornish hen”?
And** dwyer** we would call that “English Pudding” a plum duff. (for fairly obvious reason we don’t have anything caled “english pudding”. And don’t get me started on what you lot call “english muffins” 
owlstretchingtime a Cornish game hen is, for all intents and purposes, a baby chicken. They are usually five to six weeks old when they meet their maker. Kinda like veal, cept it’s a chicken. They are yummy though. I tried to find a picture but all I could find was recipes for cooking baby chickens.
As the cheese-eating note-very-brave monkeys are only 22 miles away we call them tiny chicken things “poussins” Even in Cornwall
I did ask this earlier - but what do you lot mean by “baked beans”? as I am finding it hard to believe that you mean the same as what we call “baked beans”. THis is what we mean by baked beans. (these are what made Theresa Kerry rich!)
http://www.heinz.com.au/html/products/products.asp?ID=74&categoryID=1
OK what you consider baked beans, we call “pork and beans”
But here is my sister’s recipe for baked beans…
3 lbs pork and beans
½ lb ground chuck (cooked)
3 T prepared yellow mustard
1 c ketchup
2 T worcestershire sauce
¼ c brown sugar
½ c chopped bell pepper
¼ c chopped onion
Combine all ingredients and cook 50 min at 350º.
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatos, gravy, peas–traditional christmas meal. Eaten at noon, just like dinner on every other day of the year.
X-mas dinner is a huge deal here. It takes days to prepare and weeks to consume. You can see the main dishes here.
I don’t eat meat, so I skip the pork and have the rest.
Nah, what we call baked beans are little beans in a sweetish tomato sauce. They are one of the most common foods in britain - esecially with children and those with child-like cooking skills (students, men etc)
That recipe sounds nice - we have no equivalent of that - the closest european thing to that I can think of is the Langedoc dish Cassoulet (that has duck and sausage in it too)
Honestly , our “pork and beans” is your “baked beans”. Notice that the ingredients don’t include pork. It’s soft beans in a tomato sauce and every few hundred cans is a tiny square of pork fat that no one ever eats.
Years ago, when John K was still doing Ren and Stimpy, there was a bit called “Ask Dr. Stupid,” with Stimpy as Dr. Stupid of course. Someone wrote in asking what that little white blob in the can of pork and beans was, and Stimpy answered, “That little white blob is the QUEEN BEAN, and all the others are her WORKER BEANS!”
I know I’m an idiot, but that still cracks me up.
Yes, but what it’s called might be a regional thing too. In NY you can get “baked beans”, “pork and beans”, and “vegetarian beans”. Same mushy beans, same sweet sauce - only difference is whether or not it contains a meat product (which pork and beans certainly does, regardless of how little).
International difference is, in UK, meatless (vegetarian style) is the standard.
I think owl was just surprised to see it considered holiday food, because in UK it’s anything but (although adding in all those other ingredients and baking it, rather than just heating up the naked can contents does make it an entirely different dish).
Well… calling it a pudding is preferable to “duff” since that word usually refers to the posterior portion of one’s anatomy around here.
And about the cornish game hen controversy-according to this site they were the result of the chicken mogul Tyson’s crossing white rock hens and cornish hens to produce a naturally smaller bird. We had them for Christmas dinner occasionally when I was a kid. Very tasty and exciting to get a whole little bird to yourself.