Christmas traditions

[Sibling DavidH]

Do any Siblings have any interesting Christmas traditions in their family?  We have a few which you might find entertaining:

1) Ever since Mrs H's grandparents immigrated from Holland about 100 years ago they have always kept back at least one Christmas pudding (cooked) until the next year, and stirred it into the new pudding mix.  I can personally vouch for the line being unbroken since 1970, and the older generation were quite certain it went back to the arrival of Granny Kuipers in the UK.  Nobody has any idea whether it goes back beyond that to Holland; it might easily be very old indeed.  I can't believe nobody ever checked on that, but afaik they didn't.
At the moment the tradition is being kept up by us and also by a branch of cousins.  One year we had to give them half our pud to keep their line going and once or twice we've had to cut mouldy bits off, so not a whole pudding has always gone in.  But we claim the tradition has not been broken thereby.  Homeopathy?  Maybe.

2) For the last 15 years we've tried to get the entire family: spouses,  kids and all to come here for a weekend to make the family cakes and puds.  Mrs H also does some for friends, so we make something like 15 cakes and 15 puds.  We mix the stuff in a big plastic box and do the bulk of the hard work with a dough-hook on a mains electric drill.  The cakes are baked in our coal stove, our gas stove and often next door as well.  The boiling of the puds takes 2 or 3 days, again on 2 stoves.



3)   Before Mrs H ices the cakes, she and I sit down with a hypodermic syringe each and large tumblers of mixed rum, brandy and sherry (etc) and we inject the cakes with considerable volumes of booze.  Last night I was putting 20ml into the small cakes and 40ml into the big ones.  Believe me, you can taste it.  Considerable quantities of rum also go directly into me (drunk, not injected) which is why I'm feeling a bit rough this morning.

[Opsa]

What a happy cooking scene! It does me good to see it.

Mr, Ops likes to make apple brined turkey every year (I think the recipe is down in our recipes thread). He just loves to fuss over it. Even though I'm vegetarian, I enjoy the smell of the marinade, made the night before cooking (oranges, cloves- good smells!) and sitting down outside with him at the grill, where he cooks it over a fire. We always have a "fire beer" together, usually a nice warm Guiness Stout, as we're usually freezing out there. Soon the chill is gone. 

[Darlica]

Lovely tradition David!
When I was a small child my mother used to do a lot of traditional Christmas preparations together with me, it became a tradition but it was broken (first downsized) when I grew older and my school and her job made it hard to find time. I guess it broke completely when I got a home of my own. 

We used to make traditional pork sausage (yes from scratch), grinding pork meat and fat as fine as the grinder allowed mixing it with a few cooked potatoes and spices to a batter and then stuff it in to its casing (sheep intestine usually). The finishing touch was to let it simmer slowly in a good broth until they where cooked.

We made quite advanced Christmas decorations in our living-room windows which faced the street, little winter landscapes and such. We cleaned the house together one day and put up the decorations the day after.

We used to bake gingerbread cookies and saffron buns (I did try to do that on my own when I lived in a bigger flat with a bigger kitchen but it wasn't the same  ) I miss proper saffron buns... Turmeric might give them the proper colour but not the right taste!

The only tradition that have been lingering to the present day is the Christmas meatballs. We make them a bit heavier on the allspice than our standard recipe and we make them smaller usual too and great effort is made to shape them as perfectly round as can be.
My mother usually makes the batter and I roll them while she is frying. 200 a batch takes its time.

[Sibling DavidH]

^ and ^^ Lovely.  Just the kind of traditions which make Christmas real.  Nowadays too much of it comes out of very expensive, shiny boxes.  Mrs H's family always go for a load of expensive junk novelties in the stockings.  They normally sit around on shelves for a bit and then get chucked out or dumped on Oxfam.  I've tried to discourage this and stick to a few really good presents.  And in fact this year I'm going to propose another present 'truce' again to Mrs H so we'll only buy each other a wanted book or suchlike, nothing big.  There's nothing either of us wants, anyway.  But this year there'll be seven of us here including Cap'n B, and that's all I need.

[Aggie]

The only tradition that have been lingering to the present day is the Christmas meatballs. We make them a bit heavier on the allspice than our standard recipe and we make them smaller usual too and great effort is made to shape them as perfectly round as can be.
My mother usually makes the batter and I roll them while she is frying. 200 a batch takes its time.

I would love to see a recipe for proper Swedish Meatballs, Darlica - they are a well-known but I suspect wrongly translated food over here.

[Sibling DavidH]

I've never tasted them, but I'd love a chance to. 

[Darlica]

I would love to see a recipe for proper Swedish Meatballs, Darlica - they are a well-known but I suspect wrongly translated food over here.

I'm not sure there even is such a beast... 

Meatballs isn't really that traditional food, it's a fairly young dish here... They are widely popular though.
That means that there are probably as many variations of meatballs as there are people cooking them! And when it comes to the ingredients, well that varies a lot: type of meat, potatoes or bread crumbs, cream or soda water, a whole egg or just the yolk...  civil wars have been fought over less!    

The ones my mother and I make isn't very traditional at all, we usually have garlic in them, that would make any traditionalist cry for sure! But they taste good.

If L or I can find the time to scramble up and translate a recipe, we'll post it in the kitchen area.

[Aggie]

OK, thanks!  I think meatballs are almost universal, but I thought there might be something in the spices or whatever that makes them "Swedish Meatballs".   If not, at least I can tell the folks here that it's the real thing, they'll believe me.


I am almost too timid to ask for Mrs. H's pudding recipe - Christmas pudding seems not to have crossed the pond, or at least has faded with time, so there's an air of mystery to it.

Rum-laced Christmas cakes are another story - Mom has a very good recipe using natural dried fruit (none of the green-died candied frankencherries) that gets good and tipsy every year.  I think last year she almost dropped the bottle and over-rum'd it - delicious!

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Our Christmas tradition that may be a bit unfamiliar to the rest of you is Christmas Morning Wife Saver - hmm, how do I describe this beast?  It's kind of breakfast in a baking dish and includes ham, eggs, cheese, bread, butter, milk and cornflakes.  It can be made up ahead of time and put in the fridge overnight, then put in the oven Christmas morning while the presents are being opened.  As far as I know, despite being easy to make this is almost never eaten except on Christmas morning, and is quite possibly a uniquely Canadian thing.

A basic recipe goes like this:

In 9 X 13″ buttered baking dish (use a BIG dish), put 8 pieces of bread, Add
pieces to cover dish entirely. Cover bread with cooked back bacon slices or
ham slices. Lay slices of cheddar cheese on top, then cover with slices of
bread (to make it like a sandwich).
In a bowl, beat, eggs, salt and pepper.To egg mixture, add dry mustard,
onion, green pepper, Worcestershire sauce, milk and Tabasco. Pour over the
'sandwiches'. Cover and let it stand in the fridge overnight.

In the morning, preheat oven to 350° F.

Melt 1/4 lb butter and pour over top. Cover with crushed corn flakes. Bake 1 hour in 350° F oven.

Let stand for 10 minutes before serving.

Delicious, and usually holds you over until turkey dinner. 

Dad's tradition at Christmas is to make fancy coffees, rimming the cups with sugar, adding a liberal dose of liqueur, and topping with whipped cream. Essential (to stay awake) after Christmas dinner.  It's also become a bit of a tradition open up stockings first thing in the morning but to save the presents for after breakfast except one - Dad is always pointed to a bottle of liqueur to open early so we can spike our morning coffee, too.

[pieces o nine]

Great thread idea -- fun to read everyone's contributions!


Tradition I Have 'Updated'...
Maternal grandmother made a hoaska (braided sweetbread) each Christmas. My version has something different rolled into each of the braid sections (usually cinnamon/sugar/orange zest in one, cloves & raisins in another, honey and almonds in the last); it's kind of a nod to the mythical magi.



Although Grandma invited us to stay with her and help with the baking every year, her hoaska was the one recipe she would not write down for me! The best I could ever get out of her was a twinkling smile and, "First you take your sweet roll dough..."




Defunct Tradition Which I Would Not Have Carried On...
Mom's creche had a detachable Baby Jesus. It came out on the first Sunday of Advent with the dramatis personae roaming about on adjacent coffee tables (Joe & Mary; angels; shepherds watching their flocks by day & night, with dogs; wise guys & their entourage; villagers; the whole schmear) subject to frequent rearrangement -- EXCEPT -- the Baby J who made a dramatic entrance on Christmas Eve. Mom then cut up yellow yarn into ~2" lengths and stacked them (much like cordwood) next to the stable.

Each night after Reciting The Rosary As A Family, we each had to evaluate our behavior. If we felt we had been good, we could transfer a piece of yarn to the plastic manger to make it more cushy and welcoming. If we felt we had been deficient, we had to remove a piece of yarn and it was all our fault if the Baby J had to sleep on cold, hard plastic !!11one!!   To be honest, I don't actually remember this happening  (perhaps I repressed it as too horrible?)  but the *fear* of it has clearly stuck me to this day...

[Sibling DavidH]

Ooh, that thing with the yarn sounds a bit of a guilt-trip.  Glad it's defunct.  Aggie, I'll get the pud recipe for you soon; right now Mrs H is working at home on the computer because she can't get to work in the weather conditions.  And personally I find the wife-saver recipe great until you mentioned the corn-flakes.  I reckon I'd leave those off.
Wow, what a lovely lot of traditions from all over the world.     

[Lindorm]

Just gotten back from a looong night out on the rails, so I am too tired to write anythign comprehensible at the moment. I'll try to write something when I have slept for a bit.

Just a quick impression: I once found an american cookbook with a recipe for what the authors  swore on the souls of their mothers was genuine, honest-to-God, hyper-authentic Swedish Meatballs.

The mince contained such things as garlic and chicken bouillon cubes, and the whole thing was finished off in a yoghurt-and-dill sauce, and recommended serving the result with rice. In other words, that recipe made the Swedish Bikini Team look like Ingmar Bergman .

(The cookbook also featured such culinary delights as a "salad" consisting mainly of tinned mandarin oranges, mayonnaise, miracle whip and grated radishes. )

[Lindorm]

Oh, I just had a look at teh german Wikipedia and saw that they wrote that meatballs are traditionally made out of elk meat in Sweden and Finland. 

I might just have to hijack this thread as a startign point for a crusade! 

[Swatopluk]

I actually like moose and reindeer sausage.
Hunting in Norway of big wild animals is quite tightly controlled, so I see no problem there (apart from potential radioactive 'memories' of Chernobyl).

[Aggie]

And personally I find the wife-saver recipe great until you mentioned the corn-flakes.  I reckon I'd leave those off.

Those make the dish, actually - you crush them up into small bits and they get crispy when you bake 'em (I think Mom puts the butter on AFTER the corn flakes, will have to check).  It'd be a bit of a spotty, soggy mess without them, I reckon.  It's similar to putting a breadcrumb topping on macaroni and cheese casserole, or an oatmeal topping on a fruit crisp.

Meatballs were always traditionally made of venison chez nous when I was a kid. A deer yields a few dense roasts, a couple of steaks, a larger portion of stew meat and a LOT of hamburger.

Of course, I could always go to IKEA and pick up a kilo bag of the authentic thing, right? 

[Griffin NoName]

Of course, I could always go to IKEA and pick up a kilo bag of the authentic thing, right? 

What? Here IKEA is a furniture store.

I have only one Chrstmas tradition, to go away to a hotel and I don't know how much longer I can afford it.