I’m a South African descended from English and Irish settlers and I would say the same. I know that turkey or goose is the “traditional” Christmas roast, but I’ve always actually had chicken. Accompanied of course by stuffing, roast potatoes, assorted vegetables; and followed by Christmas pudding with brandy butter.
Honestly, the only food I associate with Christmas would be cookies - in abundance! Maybe because my family never had a particular traditional meal - in fact, I’m hard pressed to think of any specific dinner on Christmas treated in the same way as Thanksgiving. I think we mostly grazed. So I guess I have no perception of traditional Christmas dinner.
Like many, our house switched from Thanksgiving Turkey to roast-anything-else, typically ham, prime rib or occasionally leg of lamb and a slightly different medley of side dishes ( probably mashed potatoes was the only thing in common). This year my folks did a small prime rib, scalloped potatoes and asparagus for themselves.
As I noted in another thread this year I did a not-particularly-Christmasy Tuscan chicken w/pasta dish because I had some chicken I needed to get rid of and I had to do something fast before heading to work Christmas Day. But the week before I did do a more traditional ham with mashed potatoes and stewed green beans. Honestly one of things I have always liked about the holidays is the sudden easy availability of whole turkeys and high-quality hams because I like both of those things and at least in the past they weren’t always easy to find year round. I have an extra ham in the freezer right now for that very reason 
.
dec. 25th is thanksgiving 2.0. mostly vegetables with turkey or ham depending on the non orthodox family members.
jan 6 nativity eve, has a 12 course vegan dinner, no meat, no dairy. most churches will have a communal dinner before or after the very long service. i usually just eat the kutya (a grain mixed with honey, fruit, and nuts).
jan 7th nativity, kielbasa, pierogis/latkas, and depending on the family members favourite vegetables. if it is a late family dinner, i’ll get some chicken as that is what i miss most during lenten times.
the nativity eve meal happens again on baptism eve jan 18th, with an equally long service.
As I said, lamb meat is quite uncommon around here; we’re more likely to eat pork. It’s doubtful the BIL had lamb before he went to Kuwait. He said the smell of roasted lamb was a turnoff and made him recall the war. I’ve heard the sense of smell can be very powerful in bringing back memories.
Sure. If he never had lamb before going to Kuwait that makes sense. I grew up eating lamb chops and leg of lamb. Lamb chops was one of our favorite meals as kids. So it’s not an obvious association for me, that’s all.
Which reminds me…i should defrost some chops for later this week.
I’m Mexican-American, and the typical food in south Texas for Mexican-Americans at Christmas is tamales. We already had turkey at Thanksgiving and nobody wanted a repeat. I used to think that the traditional Christmas dinner for white people involved goose for that reason, because who would want to do another turkey one month later?
We always have the traditional turkey and all the trimmings on Thanksgiving, so like most folks here, we usually do something different for Christmas. Prime rib roast is typical. We HAD to have pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, and we often had it again on Christmas. When I was a kid, we always had a mince pie because my dad liked it. Nobody else touched it. I made a trifle one year, and it was such a hit, I made it for about ten years after that.
My BiL is from Maine, and his birthday is Christmas Eve, so their traditional Christmas Eve dinner is lobster rolls. Yum!
When I worked, a friend used to bring me back some of his mom’s homemade tamales. But only if I pronounced “tamale” not like a gringo. One year I actually I helped make dozens of tamales. It was a lot of fun!
My long-time drummer had a Christmas party a few years ago, and a condition of attendance was you had to learn how to wrap a tamale and make a few. I knew I was going to eat as many as I could, so I wrapped them until I was told to stop. We filled his wife’s tamalera, and were served some of the best tamales I’ve ever eaten. Her filling beats the hell out of all of the things I’ve tried.
ETA:Hmm, maybe I have an idea for what to do with some of that frozen brisket. Still unlikely to be as good as hers, though.
We started doing a trifle with a rib roast for our Christmas dinner as well. It goes over well; everyone seems to like it, but it can be a bit rich. Pumpkin pie is for Thanksgiving and lemon pie is mandatory at Easter.
I’ve had it, a couple of times.
You take a large joint of goose, and roast it. It turns into a much smaller joint of meat, and a large puddle of liquid fat. The meat tastes a lot like roast beef.
It’s nice.
Not sure if I understand your use of the word ‘joint’. I’m A Bloody Yank, and way out west to boot.
All I know about Geese is they are noisy and shit greasy stuff all over your patio. And their heads are the size of a golf ball…
BTW: what exactly is “mince” pie? I’ve been told variously that it contains fruit, and that it is “fleishig,” which is to say, a meat product. I’ve assumed that this means that the crust is made with drippings, or suet or something, but I don’t actually know. For all I know, it could have some combination of meat and fruit, similar to duck a l’orange, which I gather has oranges, currants, and tomatoes (technically a fruit), as well as several vegetables, so that it is almost as much produce as meat.
Or maybe it contains no meat in the “flesh” sense, and just in the “solid food” sense, and people are fooled by the term “mincemeat.”
Mince is a combination of ingredients (almost always fruit, but traditionally also meat or suet) finely chopped, combined with a spirit, and cooked in a pie. Meatless mince is more common now, but it’s still referred to as mincemeat. It’s essentially the pie version of fruitcake.
The usual mince pie in the UK is mixed currants, raisins, apple and citrus peel, normally plus brandy, fully enclosed in sweet shortcrust pastry, normally about 3" round. Older versions often contained meat and suet, but I can’t remember finding one in a shop which wasn’t vegetarian- and as I am vegetarian, I do check.
I was very disappointed as a child to be given a nice little meat pie as an an extra bit of food to eat only to discover that instead of a lovely meaty filling it was full of bloody raisins and other fruity stuff. Yuk!
Once in Pennsylvania, DH and I inquired whether the pies at a diner had lard in them, and the waitress bristled, and answered “Of course our pies have lard!” like we were in Wisconsin, and had asked if the coffee, in fact, had real cream, or some powdered nonsense. I’d had no idea the Pennsylvanians were so proud of their lard.
Lard makes better pies than artificial shortening, like Crisco.
I use palm oil to make vegan pie crust (or butter, if I’m not feeding vegans) and i, personally, like it more than lard because the flavor is “cleaner” and pairs better with the fruit filling I am probably making. But I recognize why others prefer lard, and I tend to agree that it tastes better in a meat pie.
In this context, he means a goose thigh, or breast quarter.
I’ve always roasted my geese whole. I think it tastes a lot more like duck than like beef, but it is a dark meat that tastes of myoglobin, unlike a chicken breast. You do end up with a lot of fat when you cook goose. I use a “baster” to remove it from the pan several times as the bird cooks. I also save the day and use it to cook vegetables and popcorn. It’s a fabulous cooking fat. The flavor isn’t as strong as the flavor of duck fat (also tasty) but it adds depth and richness and a little umani to the dish. Friends rave about my potatoes roasted in goose fat.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a pie crust made with lard, unless it was by accident, and I didn’t realize it. I’ve had them made with suet, and with drippings, and don’t remember those being especially good. I do remember my mother using Crisco for the first time-- she’d used only animal fat, butter, or KFP margarine before, I guess, and remarking how easy the dough was to work with.
I make quiche crusts with olive oil, and they work great for quiche, but I wouldn’t use that for a pie. I use Crisco, and also put in a little soy lecithin and barley malt. They really improves the texture of the crust, and it doesn’t go stale-- well, doesn’t in the few days it takes us to eat a couple of pies, whereas, the shelf-life of crust without them is only about 1/2 a day. I also put in a 1/4 tsp of sugar for every cup of flour, and it makes it much flakier.