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A culinary Christmas

By Krissy Tripp

Published Dec. 3, 2010

As a food junkie, I love the holidays. I get to show off my culinary skills for others as I bake desserts and prepare appetizers for various holiday parties.

Food has strong cultural ties, and it's how many people choose to connect. Think about how many dates have taken place over dinner, casual meetings over coffee and late-night cram sessions over excessive sweets and coffee.

Anyhow, I thought it might be enlightening to look at where some of our holiday food traditions come from. Because I cannot explain the intricacies of various religious and American traditions in one column, I'll do so in a series of columns and blogs that I'll beg my editor to publish until, and during, the holiday break. Fitting, right?

I'll start with one tradition I feel most of my readers are comfortable with: baking cookies for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. According to Christmas Lore, a website dedicated to Christmas traditions, this is not such an old one. Parents wanted to inspire their children to share with others during the Great Depression, so they started asking their children to help bake cookies to give to Santa, who gets hungry on his worldwide journey to provide presents for all the good boys and girls. In some parts of France, they have a pain calendeau, or a Christmas bread to be shared with the poor.

Eggnog, unlike Santa's cookies, is considered to be a timeless tradition, dating back to the 1600s. It's a descendant of the British drink containing eggs, milk and ale, a common drink of the English upper class in the 1800s. "Nog" refers to the "noggin," the wooden mug used to serve the eggnog.

Mincemeat pies, another English tradition, dates centuries back. There used to actually be meat in the pies -- what better way to cook leftovers, right? Nowadays the pies are filled with fruit, not to be confused with the Christmastime fruitcake.

Fruitcake is a traditional English food. It seems the Puritans didn't change as much as they'd have liked when it came to Christmas. It's an oddly common gift in the U.S., though many are bought commercially rather than made with the intensive labor of the 1700s and 1800s. Fruitcakes usually consist of dried fruit, honey and nuts.

What tradition would be complete without a few silly superstitions? Apparently, you're supposed to set the table for an even number of people at a Christmas dinner, no matter how many guests are coming, and leaving before everyone is finished will bring bad luck.

You should also serve dessert pudding. When making Christmas pudding, the trick is to have everyone stir it three times while looking at the bottom of the bowl and make a wish. Then throw in a silver coin, thimble and ring. Eat carefully, because receiving one of these things means bright things in your future. The coin means luck, the thimble means prosperity, and the ring means marriage.

Although many of the listed traditions originated in England and are practiced in the U.S., it's important to note many other predominantly Christian countries have rich Christmas food traditions.

In France, for example, there is a pre-holiday season beginning Dec. 6 with the fête de Saint Nicolas, which is basically a large feast in honor of Santa.

In the Ukraine, it's tradition to have 12 dishes at dinner, none of which can be meat other than fish. The idea is to have one dish for each apostle. Some of the common dishes include kolach (a pastry representing trinity and eternity), kutia (boiled wheat with poppy and honey), borsch (beet soup), vushka (dumplings with mushrooms and onions) and fish.

Because the English also colonized Australia, many of its traditions match ours, except for the weather. It's warm during the Australian Christmas, so dinner might be more likely to include potato salad, pasta, seafood or colder snacks. Of course, the traditional English turkey or goose might make an appearance as well.

Food is one way traditions have lived on, surviving economic, political and technological changes. It is one way culture is preserved across the globe.