Christmas around the world

[shhbabymine]

So to expand our ideas of Christmas and to add some learning fun into our holidays we are doing 12 days of Christmas around the world.
If you have any traditions you celebrate that are unique to where you live, or a favorite recipe, etc. would you please share...

Today we are making these pretty Florentines we found at
Foodtv's cookies from around the world And we are having Lasagna for dinner
and I have some crafts for the kids to do too, and I found a site with holiday words translated into Italian.
Anyway, I am sure this will all make it to my blog, but I would love to learn more about your traditions, etc. and add them to our list this Christmas....

[maureenreynolds]

Well, in Maryland, at least near Baltimore and in my late in-laws family, you can be sure to have sauerkraut with your turkey. My fil had a sister who married a man with a German background and my fil imported that tradition down from Brooklyn to the Washington DC area branch of the family. Turkeys these days are not so fatty but I still like the tang of sauerkraut with the bird.

[Chris]

Our dinner will be a British Sunday dinner: standing rib roast , roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding.

In England we always had crackers to pull and opened the funny little hats and everyone wore one throughout the meal. Here in the U.S. everyone laughed and put their hat on the table!

Also in England we had a Chritmas pudding - almost black from ladling the liquor over it each day ahead of time and whoever found the silver threepenny bit got an extra surprise! I buy my imported puddings when I can find them.

The ladies from the U.K. will probably fill you in with today's British traditions!

I heard about sauerkraut for Christmas here in Maryland but I've only acquired the taste for it (the good kind - not canned) with German sausage.

[KerryMac]

We have posole every Christmas Eve in our home; a tradition that my mom started years ago.
Posole is a New Mexican stew made with pork, red chiles, onions, garlic and posole (looks a bit like big white corn kernels). The spicer, the better. We serve freshly made flour tortillas with it and if I'm feeling particularly ambitious, I'll make biscochitos, a Mexican cookie, for dessert!

[sam ellis]

In South Africa it is hot at Christmas time. So we often barbeque the turkey. And even can have it cold. We eat outside on the verandah and we always swim and generally melt from the heat !

A recipe I can say is our fav pudding trifle.

Sponge cake placed on the bottom of a dish ( or finger biscuits broken)
Jelly (aka jello) poured over it. set .
pour tin of fruit salad over (no juice) .
Box of cold custard over the fruit.
Whipped cream.
Cherries

YUM

I did this lo 2 years ago to explain one of the things on our Christmas table - crackers
crackers? - Digital Scrapbooking Ideas - DesignerDigitals

what a lovely project this is for your children.

[Chris]

I love trifle - thanks for the recipe. I think lady fingers can also be used as a base! I'm not sure if you can get custard here in the U.S. (I get mine at a Brit store when we pass through Danbury, CT each year) I wonder if vanilla pudding would work?

Do you also wear the paper hats Sam?

[hendon]

We have the Christmas crackers with silly hats, jokes and gifts in them here in New Zealand too.
We will have chicken, ham or lamb (sometimes all 3!) with potatoes and salads and vegetables. And dessert will be pavlova with cream and strawberries, plum duff (a boiled fruity pudding) with cream or custard, fruit mince pies, and more strawberries! For me it's not Christmas without the pavlova and strawberries!
And it will be hot here too so we'll all be melting and saying we'll have to have a bbq next year (we've be saying that for years and years!!).

[Britgirl]

we dont make such a thing of Christmas eve daytime here, - most people work, the shops are still open and its not until night time that stocking hanging happens {and a few parties happen}. Christmas day is a lot like yours I think - stockings opened, presents opened, turkey roast lunch, etc etc. Then the day after is Boxing day, another almost repeat of christmas day, usually with a different group of family. Boxing day got its name for being the day they opened the church boxes -where they had collected coins for the poor during Christmas day services.
We always have crackers too, mince pies and trifle
too much food and lots of bad television usually

[Blossom]

In Norway the dishes you serve on Christmas Eve is kind of decided on where in the country you live - although now a days it is more what you prefer.

On the East coast where I live we eat xmas ribs from pig - baked in the oven in one large piece served with xmas sausage (it's white) and a type of meat cakes - Christmas pork ribs (juleribbe) recipe from ABC Matoppskrifter. Then we have potatoes, saus, vegetables and sauerkraut (our's is a bit sweeter than the German one).

From the west coast you got lam rib - here is the receipe and photo: Dried mutton ribs (pinnekjøtt) recipe from ABC Matoppskrifter

Some parts of the country have fish - normally cod.

Then you have the famous "lutefisk" which I had for supper yesterday - Lutefisk (dried cod treated with lye) recipe from ABC Matoppskrifter

for dessert we have ricecream made from rice porridge Creamed rice (riskrem) recipe from ABC Matoppskrifter or cloudberry cream Cloudberry cream (moltekrem) recipe from ABC Matoppskrifter

The suppers are very traditional and have been served for christmas suppers since the 1800's.

[muddygirl]

In Australia we dont make a big deal about christmas eve either. Most people are still working and the shops are all still open for last minute shopping. Depending on who is doing the christmas lunch, it is spent fighting the crowds at the supermarket. It is always REALLY hot where i am. I dont know how mother nature knows its Christmas Day - it can be beautiful the day before, with a breeze and not too hot, then BAM 25th Dec - HOT, still and Humid. Prawns feature heavily for lunches - they sell thousands of kilos of them, people line up for hours to buy them. Glazed hams are always well represented in the christmas food magazines as are allsorts of cold variations to the traditional christmas pudding eg Ice cream. I always do lost of yummy deserts for my family's christmas lunch. We have christmas crackers too and everyone sits around the table in funny paper hats reading really bad jokes to each other (they come out of the crackers). Everyone eats till they are stuffed, lies down and rests, then goes to the next relatives house to repeat the above for dinner! A game of backyard cricket isnt uncommon, oh and its fun to go out in the street early in the morning and see how many kids are riding around on the new bikes that santa left for them

[maureenreynolds]

Kerry, we love posole and have quite a few bags of Big Jim peppers in the freezer. (We brought them back from NM and roasted them here.) I'd love your recipe. btw, are you able to get the large dried posole? I pressure cook a bag of dried hominy and then freeze it but it's smaller than we'd like.

[KerryMac]

Maureen,
Lucky you! Big Jim's are awesome
I was in NM a few weeks ago and picked up some bags of frozen posole, which is so good and very hard to find anywhere else. Nice big kernels. What recipe do you use?
Here's mine: (from a cookbook called "Simply Simpatico" the Junior League of Albuq. puts out--I am not in the Junior League LOL)

2 lbs. pork roast, cut in chunks
1/2 lb. pork rinds
1 T salt
2 C posole
1 t oregano
2 cloves mashed garlic
2 T chopped onion
4 red chili pods, seeds removed

Place meat and pork rinds in a large kettle and add about 5 quarts water or enough to cover meat. Add 1 T salt and bring to boil. cook over med. heat for ~1 1/2 hours. Remove excess grease and set aside. Reserve liquid. Wash the posole very carefully until the water is clear so as to remove lime from kernels. Put in large ketle and cover with water. Boil until posole has popped. Mix meat, posole, and rind. Add oregano, garlic, onion and chili pods. Let simmer for about 1/2 hour. Additional red chili sauce may be added at serving time for more spice.

So....I try to use the frozen posole instead. I defrost it and add it to the pot and skip the cooking of the dried posole part. Easier!
Also, I make my own red chili sauce with dried Hatch red chili and add some to the pot at the end of the cooking process and also serve the sauce on the side because we LOVE NM red chili sauce! I think if you have the Big Jim's, you could make green posole instead using the same recipe.

[carollee]

We have christmas crackers too, but we call them bon bons, I usually make my own and fill them with little lollies, silly jokes, party hats (which you'll see on the first page of my december daily photo) and for the adults a scratchy lotto ticket. They look exactly like Sam's photo on her page.

And I love the Six White Boomer song. You can listen to it here. Sarah, your kids will get a giggle.
YouTube - Six White Boomers ~ Rolf Harris

Enjoy.

Oh and we always go to Carols by Candlelight here in town. Starts with a parade down the street (half the town is in the parade, LOL). Then we head up to the Village Green and have a picnic dinner, and then the Carols start. I love that. It certainly gets cooler as the sun goes down, but cross fingers it doesn't rain.

[esther_a]

Yes. We Aussies are gradually admitting it's too hot for turkeys and roast and plum puddings. Usually it's barbecue meat or cold ham and other cold meats with lots of festive salads. Desert is fresh berries on icecream trifles or pavlovas. It's a busy time of the year with school breakups. The weather is so mild that everyone is out-and-about. Lots of community carol nights, clubs get together for breakups at the local parks where they cook on the barbecues and the kids play cricket.

[whatnext]

in my ethnic group, Christmas Eve is the thing. we make a traditional dinner called Wigilia (pronounced "Vill-EE-ah.") the meal includes 12 different foods (yup. it's a labor-intensive meal) that represent the 12 Apostles. (Every family seems to have a different number of foods and a different reason for it. I think the tradition varied from village to village and family to family in the Old Country.) It's a meatless meal featuring lots of variations of "peasant food." (YUM) amazing how many different things you can make out of fish, potatoes, cabbage, mushrooms and flour. the table is set with a white cloth and a centerpiece of homemade bread with a candle in it, symbolizing Jesus as the Light of the World. You're also supposed to put hay under the tablecloth, but I usually just put straw around the bread centerpiece. i've never done this, but you're also supposed to set an extra place at the table for an uninvited guest.

i would include a recipe for making pirohi, but i don't think anyone wants to go through the ordeal of making them! it takes forever, and the dough is unforgiving....

[readstoomuch]

Our family is pretty much English, Scotch-Irish with a helping of Cherokee thrown in and we have never had what we would call an Ethnic Christmas dinner. We sort of have the same thing every year but are flexible with the dishes. Reading all of your posts it makes me wish that we too had a traditional ethnic dish to look forward too. We don't have any specific Ethnic traditions either ... although I did buy some Christmas crackers a few years back for the grandchildren to open before Christmas dinner.

On Christmas Eve, we have tacos before our church services . . . I finally figured out that an easy supper make me much more thankful and struggling with a huge Christmas Eve supper and an exhausted me!

We have an enormous brunch on Christmas morning before we open the gifts and after the kids open their stockings. Then much later in the day we have a Christmas supper. This sort of changes every year for us.

[quilter422]

what a great idea for a thread!

my mom always put an orange into our christmas stockings. she is the oldest of 9 kids and grew up in a poor village in southwest ireland. her parents saved for months to have enough to put an orange into each stocking. they were not gobbled down, either, but savored and made to last several days. so i now put an orange in my kids' stockings as well.

[PaulaSG]

Chris - vanilla pudding is a pretty close substitute for cold custard!

My brother and I ALWAYS have crackers and we wear the hats

[Mozer]

There's a whole free Christmas Around the World lapbooking/unit on my blog. Lots of ideas there plus some printables.

[LisaD]

Originally Posted by Mozer

There's a whole free Christmas Around the World lapbooking/unit on my blog. Lots of ideas there plus some printables.

Thanks. I just went to check it out. Great unit. Also quickly glanced at your blog & your squido lens on workboxes. Will be looking closer at that. Thanks so much.