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Holiday Foods (or How I Learned To Like Holidays After Leaving Home)

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hodge

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I for one would really like to hear about holiday food traditions from members around the world -- Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, Eid, Easter, you name it.

When I was still living at home, holidays were worse than ordinary days. My mom was even more irritable and prone to picking fights. I have no idea why.

To this day I get physically ill at the smell of cooking pineapple, because she would cook ham with pineapple on top of it for Christmas and Easter.

Once I left, I found holidays much more relaxing and enjoyable. In our home now we sometimes have ham for holidays, but with various mustards on the side. I think the only other unique thing we do is stuff celery with cream cheese. One of my grandmothers would stuff celery with cream cheese mixed with chopped green olives to go with Christmas Eve dinner.

Since moving out to Minnesota I discovered it's traditional here among many Scandinavian Americans to have oyster stew on Christmas Eve. The first Christmas I was here, my future MIL invited us over for that. I brought my own split pea soup as I'm allergic to shellfish, lol. Lutefisk is also traditional out here for Christmas. It's cod cured in lye. I guess you soak all the lye out before cooking it. I have never tried it. Lefse is another traditional Scandinavian-American food around here for Christmas. It's a thin soft bread made of potatoes. Some have it with just butter on it. Some add sugar, too.

My African-American friends back in the Detroit area make homemade macaroni and cheese to go with the traditional Anglo Thanksgiving dinner. I thought about doing that this year, but couldn't quite handle the thought of that carbo overload, haha, nor the extra work involved.
 
@hodge Yummmmmm. I used to do the cream cheese and green olives on all holidays. You have to add a bit of the juice from the olive jar to mix it up too.

I too hate pineapple and ham, my grandmother used to cook it every Xmas too. She used to make a side dish of yams with marsh mellows. My sister used to make the green bean casserole with the crispy onion rings on the top.

I don't have many good memories of the holidays at all. Basically it was confusion, yelling and screaming, way to much stress for the adults and they would end up taking it out on us kids. When I got out of the house, I LOVED Christmas, and loved giving gifts. Now, could care less about it. Just another day of the week.
 
Yeah, stuffed celery is totally yummy. When my Misha was alive, she would sneak them off the table, lol.

Oh, yeah, they do the green bean with french fried onions casserole thing out here, too. I would make that as long as my MIL was alive. I never had it back in Detroit and don't make it anymore. My cooked vegetable of choice for Thanksgiving is Le Seuer baby peas. Only time of the year we eat canned peas. It just somehow goes really well with the stuffing and cranberry sauce.

I used to make yams here, too, not with marshmallows, though, ick. That was another dish that went when my MIL went. No one would eat it but her.
 
I used to be married to a German and learned the joys of red cabbage. It is especially good with mashed potatoes. I just learned to make a delicious version from scratch rather than buy it in a jar.

My mom quit doing holidays when I was in my 20s. Then on, I hosted fun potlucks with friends, instead. Family of choice wins out, again.
 
Growing up with my hippie/Buddhist/feminist mom, we had a lot of potlucks, but no specific traditional food. We are also Jewish (non-practicing) and I love latkes (potato pancakes with sour cream and applesauce!) When my parents were still together we celebrated Channukah; after they split we started celebrating Xmas (oh what joy to a 7 year old who didn't have any other Jewish friends.) We celebrated Xmas for 10 years, but also started celebrating the Winter Solstice (gotta love a hippie mom!)

My stepdad (not an abuser, someone I adore) brought more traditions into the family when I was about 19-20. He loves Xmas, and his mom (a racist, xenophobic, homophobic mean old biddie, but a good cook) had some great recipes. One tradition now in our family is a mashed potato dish: 5 lbs potatoes, 1 stick of butter, 1 tub (8 oz?) of sour cream, 1 brick (8 oz?) of cream cheese. O.M.G. If you like creamy mashed potatoes and would like a heart attack, these are for you! My mom, the hippie/health food junkie, always used to make mashed potatoes with the skin, but these really need to be peeled. [As an aside, one year my mom decreed we were going to have healthy food for the holidays. She put wheat germ in the gravy and was forever banned from the kitchen by me and my sisters.]

My wife is African American and Caribbean. Wow, talk about some f*cking yummy-ass food traditions! After 23 years and a delightful, loving relationship with my MIL, these are some of the foods that I make for the holidays: Greens (collard greens but also mixed greens, turnip & mustard greens, add some spinach at the end, made with smoked turkey wings instead of ham hocks); Homemade baked macaroni and cheese (I was 25 before I learned that Mac & Cheese didn't just come from a box with neon orange "sauce"); Lima beans with pork neckbones; oxtail stew; curried chicken with curried cabbage. My wife sometimes makes codfish and fungee (like cornmeal/polenta balls), callaloo (hard to find actual callaloo leaves, so she uses spinach. It includes okra, which I only eat if fried, hate the slimy texture!), hopping john (black eyed peas on New Years Day.) It's also traditional in her family to have a ham, just the way you are talking about it, with the pineapples & maraschino cherries & cloves, but we just order ours now from Honeybaked Ham!

Finally, I love stuffing (dressing.) I cheat, and just doctor up a box of Stovetop with turkey giblets, extra celery and onions, and usually pecans or sometimes chestnuts, and sometimes a small amount of chopped & sautéed apples.

Goddamn it, Hodge! Now I'm hungry and my planned Xmas menu has grown exponentially!
 
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