Happily Holidayed
I love the winter holidays. In spite of the persistent (and often very bad) music, the frenzied crowds, and the abundance of naughty foods that make me a little cuddlier by January 1, I still give the Thanksgiving-to-New Years stretch of serial holiday-time a thumbs up.
For me, it comes down to tradition, many of which have little to do with the actual holiday we’re celebrating and more to do with, well… the food.
In my childhood home, my favorite Thanksgiving ritual was laying out the sliced bread (half white, half whole wheat) in the turkey pan to stale overnight for the next days’ stuffing. Invariably, that bread would be a little stiffer in the morning. Yay for science!
We always have lasagna on Christmas Eve, and share a decadent meal of sauerbraten with friends on Christmas Day in a tasty nod to my German heritage. (My favorite non-food ritual is that we watch The Sound of Music as a family every single year. This is made even more entertaining by my five-year-old niece who knows all the words to every single song and seems to have known them since she started talking. It’s astonishing.)
And then on New Year’s Day, we prepare the superstitious meal of black-eyed peas, collard greens, and cornbread for good luck and prosperity. Delicious and nutritious!
As I become a real adult (getting there, slowly), and now that I live pretty far from my family in Atlanta, I love to see what traditions get preserved and which ones have started evolving into other new and equally random rituals. My S.O., for example, always has cracked crab with his family on Christmas Eve. I like crab, and I really like this twist on holiday fare! Making a crabby mess on a newspaper-covered kitchen table is just fun. And yummy. Maybe in the coming years we could try a cracked-crab lasagna.
What do you celebrate in your family, or where you live? Are your memories and adulthood celebrations as food-centric as mine? What is your favorite holiday, and holiday tradition?
– Lindsey
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