Here’s hoping you’ve had a great Christmas day and are ready to face the rest of the season!
This was our first real Christmas in the USA, so we decided to celebrate in slightly unconventional fashion. Back in the UK I have to admit to being lazy; we have a store called Marks and Spencer where the food is very good and you can order pretty much aall the parts of your Christmas dinner. There’s still a lot of cooking to do, but the risky bits are done for you. It usually tastes fantastic, the down side is that you have to place your order sometimes as early as October (or some items are sold out) and you have to go an collect it, which means standing in a long queue of harassed people in a crowded shop on Christmas Eve. Not the ideal start.
This year I decided things would be different; after a year of financial doom and gloom it seemed wrong to have one of those dinners where there are huge amounts of leftovers, I thought we’d try and get things right, partially by having things everyone liked, rather than sticking to tradition.
How did it go? I think I can report partial success. My children requested a complete absence of turkey, so we settled for what seems to us to be the most American of meals, hamburgers, but home made. My husband likes the staples of brussel sprouts and roast potatoes, so we had those with the hamburgers, along with an assortment of chutneys and sauces. For dessert we had the traditional English favorite, not plum pudding but Christmas trifle. Made entirely from scratch we could add as much or as little sugar as we liked, and my new food processor, a Christmas gift from my Mum, made short work of whipping the eggs for the custard and later the whipped cream.
Usually, after a day on my feet cooking I feel a little empty. Tradition has been served, but despite all the preparation that goes into it, Christmas dinner is a little flat. The kids are just not THAT excited by Turkey and the trimmings, my kitchen is full of dirty dishes and my refrigerator full of leftovers which noone particularly wants to eat. This year there’s a little of the trifle left, but everything else is long gone. Tradition has not been satisfied, but our appetites were, and really who cares about the rest? In our first Christmas in a new country, its a time to make new traditions. We were together. That’s one Christmas tradition I’m firmly in favour of.