We always have lasagna for Christmas Eve dinner (we're mostly French and German); not Italian. Prime Rib for New Years Eve....

Linda P

Pink Jello Salad for holiday meals....ALWAYS!!!

'Nuff said.

Deanna

My maternal grandmother, my aunt, & my Mom loved cold pork & bean sandwiches slathered with ketchup. Mom's 3 daughters have all successfully broken the tradition, thank g*d! :)

/tricia

This is fun! My family always made cole slaw with Thanksgiving and Christmas turkey dinners. I never thought they went together. Christmas Eve at midnight they always had a lunchmeat spread with potato salad. My sister and I couldn't wait to be old enough and join the fun!
Gina

LOL cutting the ends off the ham!

I don't know if it's strange or not but it sure is a tradition. Our Christmas and T-day menus are identical and haven't changed in 60 years......oh now and then something is added but the basics just never change.

The tradition, besides the menu, is that the children (and sometimes the adults! LOL) try and "steal" pieces of the turkey as it's being carved and the carver pretends to "whack" them. The hero is anyone who can "steal" some of that luscious dark morsels on the underside of the bird.

One tradition in our family that dates back at least to my great-great-grandmother's time is that of "Moving Day Stew" being the first meal eaten after moving into a new residence. It's a luscious beef stew with onions, turnips, carrots and rice.

Although no one knows how it got started, it's one ritual that my daughters' generation still follows. I'd guess that the ingredients would have been available all year 'round and for short moves, a pot wrapped up in a couple have quilts would have stayed warm until arrival.

We also follow the PA Dutch traditions of eating pork and sauerkraut on New Year's Day and fastnachts on Shrove Tuesday.

For years when I made the Christmas plum pudding I dumped in all of the candied citron, pineapple and cherries my grandmothers recipe called for. Because I knew her spirit was looking over my shoulder, to make sure I "did it right"!

Then I picked out 2/3 of it, because my sisters and I hate it!

The other tradition was that everyone in the family got to stir the batter for luck. My mother makes persimmon pudding now instead, and while I miss the stirring -- we like the pudding much better! (Blech, suet!)

And we all know the "plum" pudding is just a vehicle for hard sauce....

We make a slightly sweet eggy raisin bread, and decorate boiled eggs to be eaten Easter morning along with Kabasa (Ham Kielbasa). We have "egg fights" - one person taps the others egg on the end, then they get tapped. The goal is to survive as many taps as you can with at least one end intact. Now that we are older and actually WANT to eat the eggs, we kind of hope to lose because typically you don't just crack an egg but rather eat a "loser".

My father and I make the bread on Good Friday - a large batch that is enough for the breakfast plus several extra loaves to distribute to friends and family. It takes all day, although admittedly a lot of that is waiting for rising, rising again, and baking.

natesgramma, I don't know why it sounds different/strange, but I also cut the end off "Pork shoulders" when I make barbecue in my cast iron dutch oven on the stove, (it has to fit), I just
put the cut off piece in the pot! No fuss No muss!

I have no food traditions and like that best! I like to make new and exciting recipes at birthdays and holidays.
I grew up with lots of traditions and decades later am still rebelling.
I'd just as soon as have sushi at Thanksgiving and turkey at Easter and ham at Labor Day if everyone didn't complain about it.

When I was growing up, my Mother would make sweet bread for Easter. She made five pounds of bread at a time. She had a HUGE pan that she would mix it up in and would ask us kids to hold the pan while she kneaded the bread (no 5 minute Artisan bread then..tee-hee). Anyway, in order to keep our curly little hairs out of the dough, would we wear our underwear on our heads while holding the pan. After Mom passed, my sister and I carried on the tradition of making sweet bread for Easter...but NEVER without the underwear on our heads!!!

Our family Christmas dinners (which were a L-O-N-G time ago!) were a sort of competition between the hostesses to see how many different kinds of meat they could serve. So the table would be weighed down with chicken, ham, pork, lamb, beef, tongue, assorted prepared meats like devon and brawn, and anything else they could think of. Turkey was never available for some reason, but I remember the shock when one aunt served up kangaroo meat!

Another Christmas tradition which I still observe is the fruit salad. An enormous bowl of it was a mainstay, and into it went every fruit imaginable and available.

Trifle was and still is a Christmas treat that always appears.

And Rum Balls.

You need to remember that Christmas in Australia is summer time and usually very hot, so everything (except the Christmas pudding) was served cold, though sometimes the hostess would provide hot roast potatoes as a side-dish.

The first Thanksgiving my husband and I had his mom over, she wanted to help cook. However, she is an invalid, and is really past being helpful, so I told her to pick a dish that was tradition in her family, and I would buy the ingredients. She could then sit at the kitchen table, and tell me how to make it.

It was that casserole of green beans in cream of mushroom soup with French fried onions on top. I had never eaten it, but saw the displays in the grocery store every year, with canned beans, Campbell's Mushroom soup and cans of fried onions.

I rebelled at canned green beans and canned soup, but I got together some fresh beans and concentrated frozen mushroom soup of my own, but I did buy the can of onions.

My MIL had me cook the beans much longer than I ever would, so they were nice and smushy. :P Then she told me how to assemble the dish.

I absolutely cannot understand WHY people eat THAT, year after year.

A family tradition of my husband's that I don't mind keeping is having Clam Chowder on Christmas Eve...using my own recipe.

By me it just doesn't seem right to throw bacon in the oven when wearing more than a pair of underwear, and maybe an undershirt.

I remember a great story (i think it was a Reader's Digest, but not sure).

A daughter asked her mother if she could cook the thanksgiving meal one year. The mother said yes, of course. When she went over to her daughter's on thanksgiving her daughter proudly showed her all of the different side dishes she had done ahead of time. The mother told her how proud she was, but asked her why she had the turkey in the sink with a dish-drainer on top of it. The daughter said, "That's the way you always thawed the turkey." The mother responded, "But dear, you don't have a cat."

Our family tradition is to lose my grandmother's recipe for fudge pie every year. It never fails, whoever is going to make the fudge pie cannot find the recipe so has to call another family member. It doesn't matter if they made it for thanksgiving, by christmas it's lost.

I was raised on a farm and we were very,very, VERY poor. Food of any type was something special and we took nothing for granted.
However there was one thanksgiving I will never forget, it started off just like any other, I tried to find something for mom to cook by hunting day and night, but as hard as I tried I just came up with nothing!! I was at the point of exhaustion and had to stop hunting since I was only 10 years old, but mom gave me a big hug and told me not to worry she had a surprise for us all.
I was so excited I just forgot about the pains and eagerly awaited dinner.
We were all waiting for mom to call us to the dinning room with BIG smiles of expectation on our little faces, when she came to the door and said every things ready!
We eagerly went into the dinning room and took are usual seats and there in the middle of the table was a BIG cloth covering something! I was so excited I thought I would pee myself when mama through off the cloth, there sat "framed" in pine sprigs a BIG "COLOR" picture of a stuffed turkey, none of those little black and white pictures for us that Thanksgiving, we were made to look at the picture even though we were eating oatmeal, that was the bast oatmeal I ever had!! It's no longer a family tradition, LOL. What, you don't believe me, LOL.

Our Christmas tradition has and always will be Tourtieres (meat pies), pork and potato stuffing, and butter tarts.

For Easter, it's always a ham.

When I was little, the Fall season meant blood pudding and head cheese (pigs were butchered), and moose liver and onions (moose hunting season). That's long gone now!

In the Spring, it was smelts!

Every September I start my Brandied Cherries so they'll be ready for the holidays, and every October (around the 2nd week), I make my fruit cak...ahem..."Holiday" cakes!

rachelellen, you said you had your mother-iN-law for dinner on the first Thanksgiving. That would make you how old? Vique. John 3:16

Every holiday season, for as long as I can remember...we had Grandma's Suet Pudding. We looked forward to it every year. It is our favorite dessert of all time. (Sorry Alison) And we had the "hard sauce" with it. Our recipe didn't have plums in it...raisins and currants though. I now have a friend whose husband is a butcher. I am going to ask if he will get me some ground suet and I am going to make it for my sister and me. Yum!

Our tradition at our house, is to make at least one new thing every holiday meal.

Vique wrote:

rachelellen, you said you had your mother-iN-law for dinner on the first Thanksgiving. That would make you how old?

ROFL!! All right for you, buddy! Apparently older than dirt, but not old enough to know better! :D

Changeling, one of my favorite foods in the world (and a guilty pleasure) is spaghetti noodles with butter, salt & pepper. My husband laughs (nicely) at me when he finds me slurping up a small bowl of it before putting a spaghetti dinner on the table. When I was too young to really understand that we were pretty darn poor ourselves, we'd have that for dinner towards the end of the month. Looking back, I can only imagine what my mother felt to be putting that in front of her children for dinner, and what she must have felt upon discovering, many years later, how much I loved it still.

bump

rachelellen, if it's what you like, so what! I also happen to do the same thing.
Sometimes when It's late ( or anytime actually) and I'm working on the computer, I'll just boil some spaghetti, mix it with some butter, sprinkle some PR on it and ENJOY!
Besides you and I these other people just don't know how to snack, LOL.
Just don't ask me how it got started on it, on line anyway!

Turkey and Dressing for both Christmas and TG. And mashed potatoes and green beans. Deviled eggs no matter what holiday it is!

One Thanksgiving, my DD accidentally upset the family food tradition apple cart. Her class was studying graphs and charts in school and she was going to chart the menu items in order of popularity for an extra credit project.

After dinner, she interviewed each family member and guest and asked their 3 most and least favorite foods from the day's dinner. After she tabulated the results, she proceeded to ask my Aunt Betty (our family's annual hostess) why we had creamed onions every year when they were on just about everyone's Least Liked list.

After some discussion among the older generation, they realized that the only big fan of the creamed onions was my Great-Uncle Albert, who had died some 40+ years ago.

After further discussion, we agreed to eliminate a couple of other traditional menu items that people didn't much like anymore and continue to make the ones that still tasted good to us. So now we drink a toast in remembrance of our family members, including Uncle Albert, whose favorite foods don't all appear at the Thanksgiving table but whose progeny do.

Ruthanna, that's a wonderful story. Thanks for sharing. I've no doubt there's thousands of families across the country that also have creamed onions & don't know why? :)

/tricia

ruthanna wrote:

After some discussion among the older generation, they realized that the only big fan of the creamed onions was my Great-Uncle Albert, who had died some 40+ years ago.

ROFL!!:D And all those years, someone was making creamed onions for fear of disappointing someone (they knew not who) who'd been dead & gone! And everyone else had been eating them for fear of offending the person who made them, who likely didn't care for them herself, but was making them because if she didn't, someone (who'd been dead for decades) would be disappointed.

ROFLROFLROFL!!!

I made the mistake of learning to make Portuguese sweet bread "just like aunt Rose" and so that has become a "must do" every Easter. (I get out of it this year since DH won't be here.) And Mamalou is right, you kinda have to make it five pounds at a time. But I have never, however, worn underwear on my head when kneading it. :)

Easter tradition-- table has to have a butter lamb set in a bit of straw, fresh Kilbasa , salt in a little dish, seeded sour rye bread ,horseradish, poopyseed coffeecake and a Babka-- & those things should be taken the previous Saturday-- in a basket,
to be blessed by a Priest.

Christmas eve-- always includes oyster stew & potato/sauerkraut pierogies.

Christmas we always do a cookie exchange-- & all the adults drink at least 1 cup of "Irish Coffee"-- tho for some it's just a sip.

I have a choc cake recipe from my Gram that I still use plain old spoons when measuring .

One DD & I still make Bread & Butter pickles as my Mom taught me years ago & I use Dad's recipes & methods for making sausages .

At Easter time it's tradition for us to eat horseradish with beets. My Dad would go out to the garden and dig up the horseradish roots. This was a feat in itself since the ground would still be partially frozen. After that, my sister, father, and I would have a contest to see who could grate the most horseradish and then to see who could eat the most horseradish with beets. My sister almost always could grate the most. I almost always could eat the most!

The butter lamb at Easter was important too, but no contests involving that.

Rachelellen,as children, my Mom would make us spaghetti noodles with butter when we were sick. To this day we still refer to them as "Sicky Noodles."

I'm intrigued by the beets & horseradish, two foods I love but wouldn't have thought to eat together. Surely you didn't eat raw shavings of horseradish with boiled beets...so was it a sour cream horseradish sauce or what?

"Sicky noodles", lol. When we were sick, it was saltine crackers and milk...I'd not thought about that in a long time.

My grandmother's family Easter table always includes both red and white horseradish. Freshly grated horseradish, combined with either sour cream to make the white or beet juice, possibly from pickled eggs, to make the red. Oyster stew and pierogies (potato & cheese) was often a Christmas eve meal in my house, too, growing up, but my husband and children won't eat oysters, so my concession is cream of crab or Maryland crab soup. I never found the Christmas eve meal "strange" as this thread is entitled, but apparently, my family does! At least they love pierogi.

Our family holiday food traditions never change. Like Chase, we've had the same things every year for as long as I can remember and there would be mutiny if I changed.

No matter how tight the money was, the hoidays meals were always the same, and they still are. We ate a lot of venison and wild game thoughtout the year, and a pig only has so many hams, LOL, so those were saved for holidays. I don't remember having turkey for anything except Thanksgiving and we usually raised one especially for that meal. I just hated plucking those darned things and that's another family tradition I was glad to give up!

We did give up the oyster stew on Christmas Eve because no one likes it except my Dad, but I occasionally make him a pot "just because".

Vicky, our menu always includes the dreaded green bean casserole. I won't eat it but my girls LOVE it, complete with the canned COM soup!

We also always make pickled eggs at Easter, hard boiled eggs marinated in the pickled beet brine. They turn darker the longer you leave them, but the yolks turn the most hideous color of green/purple. LOL

And I don't think I've ever worn any underwear on my head.

Annie

Rachelellen, yes it was raw horseradish grated with grated beets too (beets were cooked)and a little vinegar to keep the color. It's a great combo. You have the sweet beets and the spicy horseradish.

Annie, not even a petticoat to play "bride?" tee hee ;o)

LOL, Teresa. Much to my Grandmother's chagrin, I was a "tomboy". If you can imagine.

I spent much of my time climbing trees, riding my pony and playing "cowboys and indians". Of course, in my version, the indians were the good guys.....

Annie

Oh my, I just have to join in THIS one.

My in-laws.....Easter dinner has always been turkey, potato salad, hard boiled eggs (no one eats them), overcooked carrots, raisin bread, kelbasa(sp?), and a huge green salad (only half of the family eats some).

One Easter I asked if I could host. DH mentioned that I (being Italian) was going to make lasagna and ham with fixins. Well, well, well....HUGE family discusion over that suggestion! Long story, but I made turkey and potato salad and NEVER hosted Easter dinner again! LOL!!!

"Well, well, well....HUGE family discusion over that suggestion!"

LOL! Oh, poor you, deemarie! And I don't blame you one bit for never hosting Easter dinner again!

A dear friend decided to have her husband's family for Christmas dinner and really do something special: beef Wellington with mushroom duxelles, special side dishes, the whole nine yards. So here comes her "dear" MIL with platters of deviled eggs and a bowl of potato salad - because they always have those with the holiday meal. :o(

Ahhh, grated beets! So a sort of spicy beet salad. It sounds yummy, so I know what I'll be trying next time they have some good beets in the store.

Oh Annie!! You haven't LIVED until you have worn underwear on your head! Wish I could find that picture of my sister and I wearing undies on our heads one Easter...it was too funny!!

Strange for me - my husband's family doesn't make gravy for their turkeys. NO GRAVY, who does that. Oh, and sometimes no mashed potatoes, baked instead.

The baked instead of mashed I could handle...I'd just mash them up and put butter on them right there. But no gravy?? Jeepers, what do they do with all their drippings and innards? Do they not like gravy or is it just that nobody knows how to make a good one?

In my twenties, I dated a Japanese man for several years. In his family, you weren't to eat anything on New Years Day until you had Mochi soup. On the seventh day of the New Year, you were supposed to eat a special seven Spring vegetable rice soup for good luck. Because all the family would come for New Years Day, the Mother of the family combined these traditions, and would make the soup with seven vegetables and mochi instead of rice. It wasn't vegetable soup like we think of it, but a very light fish broth, with the seven vegetables and the Mochi.

Now, if you've not had Mochi, an explanation is in order. Mochi is made by taking a sweetish glutinous rice and pounding it into a sticky paste in a stone mortar. Then it is formed into little round, slightly flattened cakes and dusted in rice flour to keep them from sticking to each other, to the package, to the plate to you...you get the picture.

Anyway, these are dropped into the boiling soup, the Japanese version of dumplings, where they hold their shape until you try to fish them out with your chopsticks to eat them. At this point, they stretch, and stretch, and when you take a bite, you chew and chew.

Believe it or not, I enjoyed those sticky, gooey, bland piles of rice goop.

I liked them better toasted though. If you put them in the oven or over a fire, the outside would get crisp and toasted, and suddenly split open, and the gluey mass would ooze out. These were eaten as a snack with a mixture of soy sauce and sugar as a dipping sauce.

Mochi can also be a sweet, in which case the glutinous rice is sweetened, and the little cakes stuffed with a sweetened red or white bean (whole or pureed) filling, and dusted or flavored with various things. These are not cooked, but eaten cool or at room temperature. It's something like eating a soft fondant wrapped around marzipan, if you can imagine that more easily.

Crafty- "poopyseed coffeecake"- do I take it you didn't care for it?