logo

The Global Domain Name (url) Families.com is currently available for acquisition. Please contact by phone at 805-627-1955 or Email for Details

Celebrating with Food – Traditions at Christmas

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about creating holiday traditions and celebrating with our spouses. We’ve talked about blending traditions from our families and starting our own with our new families. Often those traditions include celebrating with a great feast or some kind of meal on the Christmas holidays. Our family often celebrates with a roast beef, others celebrate with a ham or a turkey and still others celebrate with lasagna.

The food may or may not have meanings or it may simply represent bringing your family back together or bring to mind those shared meals of your youth. Food can have a positive impact on your family and on your holiday traditions. Here are some examples of previous traditions from different cultures and families and they may resemble some of your own:

  • On Christmas Eve, Swiss grandmothers would peel away the 12 layers of an onion, one layer for each month of the year and fill them with salt. They would know the weather for the coming year based on which layers were damp salt – those layers indicated the rainy month
  • In Serbia, if you find a coin in the Christmas cake it was a sign of riches to come for the year ahead
  • In Sweden and Norway, families complete their Christmas dinners with rice pudding, the pudding is made with one almond, whoever finds the almond will marry in the coming year and in Norway, when the almond is found a small portion of the pudding is put aside by each reveler in order to honor those who have passed away
  • In England, you eat an apple at midnight on Christmas Eve for the promise of good health for the following year and you should leave out a bread loaf after dinner on Christmas eve so that your family will always have bread for the next year

In my family, we always made a fresh loaf of bread on Christmas Eve to be eaten on Christmas Day. We always made a roast beef and roast potatoes because it was the basic fair that should be elevated and very simple to make. We enjoy our family holiday traditions and the meals that we make – how do you and your spouse celebrate the holidays with your food?

Related Articles:

Multi-Generational Holiday Traditions

Why You and Your Spouse Should Create Your Own Traditions

Did You Know That Scrooge May Very Well Have Saved Christmas?

This entry was posted in Holidays by Heather Long. Bookmark the permalink.

About Heather Long

Heather Long is 35 years old and currently lives in Wylie, Texas. She has been a freelance writer for six years. Her husband and she met while working together at America Online over ten years ago. They have a beautiful daughter who just turned five years old. She is learning to read and preparing for kindergarten in the fall. An author of more than 300 articles and 500+ web copy pieces, Heather has also written three books as a ghostwriter. Empty Canoe Publishing accepted a novel of her own. A former horse breeder, Heather used to get most of her exercise outside. In late 2004, early 2005 Heather started studying fitness full time in order to get herself back into shape. Heather worked with a personal trainer for six months and works out regularly. She enjoys shaking up her routine and checking out new exercises. Her current favorites are the treadmill (she walks up to 90 minutes daily) and doing yoga for stretching. She also performs strength training two to three times a week. Her goals include performing in a marathon such as the Walk for Breast Cancer Awareness or Team in Training for Lymphoma research. She enjoys sharing her knowledge and experience through the fitness and marriage blogs.