A special Christmas meal is a great way to enjoy the blessings of the season together with family and friends. I personally prepare my family’s big Christmas meal on Christmas Eve. Part of this tradition comes from experiencing a Christmas meal while living in Poland. They ate at the sighting of the first star. There were lots of candlelight and lots of food. The other reason for choosing Christmas Eve is because I was missing out on my children’s Christmas fun because I was stuck in the kitchen all day after presents were opened. I prepare a Christmas breakfast casserole or baked french toast on Christmas Eve while I am preparing all of the other dishes and put it in the oven when we get up on Christmas morning. Then when presents are all opened, we sit down for a delicious breakfast. The rest of the day, we enjoy the leftovers from Christmas Eve dinner.
The Countdown to Christmas Challenge for today is to plan out details of Christmas Eve dinner, Christmas b
reakfast, and/or a Christmas day meal. Don’t forget to include a main dish, side dishes, bread/rolls, drinks, and of course – a dessert (or two)!
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Here in New Mexico the tradition on Christmas Eve is to make a large pot of Posolé which is a red chili stew with hominy (white corn) and pork, that is served with tamales. Then you light the luminaria or farolitos (paper bags filled with sand and a candle lit inside) that line the walkway to your front door. When I was growing up in a large Italian family we had fish and pasta on Christmas Eve, went to midnight service then opened gifts and on Christmas morning we had our stockings. I wanted to save Santa for my children and make it special so we opened presents on Christmas morning and I would make cinnamon rolls or monkey bread, it smelled so good baking as we opened gifts.
Dinner will be whatever my family has potluck at the family Christmas party. I’m a little blessed that I have a large family with enough aunts and uncles that we grandkids don’t have to bring anything. After all of the years of handling it as our parents, the grandkids pretty much get to skirt by. If we offer help, they say “Oh, no, no, we’ve got it handled, you just take care of those babies” meaning our children. As for dinner on Christmas day, like I mentioned in my previous comment, without knowing for sure where my husband will be (As a personal favor to me, could everyone just go ahead and not fly on Christmas morning, please? That way my Air Traffic Controller husband won’t have to land your planes and can be home watching his daughters unwrap presents, ha!) we’re not going to have any special dinner. In hind sight, I don’t think we’ve ever really had our own Christmas Dinner. Who wants to be thinking about food when there’s so many new things to play with! *wink*
Well we too do a big Christmas eve to do. Usually all of the family contributes to it as well. My fil makes a filet mignone and I usually do some side dishes to compliment it and my sil’s do the desserts. I have to admit, there usually are not many leftovers. BooHoo. Christmas breakfast…some how it became a tradition that I make biscuits and gravy…don’t know how or why this came about but it is what it is! My girls love to have those HUGE pilsbury grands cinnamon rolls…so breakfast is easy peasy. And two years ago for Christmas dinner I threw a pork loin in the crockpot because I didn’t want to mess with it and now it’s kind of becoming a tradition. This year I’m going to do a beef roast in the crockpot. I’ll throw the potatoes and veggies in with it so all I’ll need to do is whip up some gravy. Again easy peasy. I’m like you, I don’t want to spend the day in the kitchen while everyone is enjoying their presents and socializing. Even though I have my menus planned I do still need to make a master list of what I need so I’ll be getting on that today.