Tuesday Tea: What's your favorite holiday tradition?
Fair warning: We steal ideas with abandon and add them to our own traditions
Our holidays are a mish-mash of fun, cozy, and/or delicious things we’ve co-opted from different friends and cultures throughout the years.
At the beginning of December, we have a Big Meeting where we discuss movies we want to watch, what we’re eating on the 24th, 25th, and 26th (board games and homemade nachos from this book on Boxing Day this year!), and what songs we’re adding to our Christmas playlist.
This year, Stollen Pound Cake from the Nature’s Candy cookbook by Camilla Wynne (recipes made with pretty candied fruit) made the final cut for our baking list.
We play fast and loose with the details, but a few things are perennial:
Cookies: Our Christmas cookie plate always includes Russian Teacakes from Betty Crocker’s Cooky Book (hear Mel talk about it) and these Chocolate Chip Cookies made with brown butter that gives the inside a toffee-ish flavor and texture.
Magic: Also essential to cookie baking: a very silly hairband covered in white maribou feathers. Mel calls it her princess crown, and she wears it every year on cookie-making day. These photos are from 2011, which means she’s been wearing the princess crown for at least 13 years:
Jolabokaflod: On Christmas Eve, we eat chocolates — See’s Candy, if we can get it — and read books by the light of the Christmas tree. Thanks, Iceland!
Scrooge: Different screen versions of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol come and go, but we watch the 1970 musical version starring Albert Finney every year. It’s just not Christmas without a rousing chorus of ‘Thank You Very Much.’
Growing up, we always spent Christmas Eve at my grandparents for a traditional Ukrainian dinner. My grandmother had an entrée or dish to represent every figure in the major scene. There was always some hay sprinkled underneath the tablecloth to represent the crib for baby Jesus. Some of the foods we hated as kids was pickled herring, honey barley soup, and codfish among other dishes. When I grew up and got married, I carried on this tradition by doing finger foods or appetizers for Christmas Eve along with cookies cakes and breads. I of course did Russian tea cakes, some Italian cookies, and of course chocolate chip and peanut butter cookies. Cookies such as orange drop cookies and jam thumbprint cookies were my favorite but my son‘s referred to them as adult cookies and moaned every time I made them. For appetizers, I would make dips and hot spreads as well as nachos and asparagus roll ups and cheese balls etc. Since we lived in a different city every three or four years, I would invite anyone I had met who did not have family around them at Christmas time to join us on Christmas Eve. I started baking one week before Thanksgiving and made two different kinds of cookies every week until Christmas week. I would freeze them. I always found Christmas Eve to be more special than Christmas Day. I think it’s because of the early days of going to my grandparents on Christmas Eve and having dinner with them and cousins from that side of the family that I saw very rarely. I guess this is too much information lol. Merry Christmas everyone
Living in Vermont, we always watch White Christmas every year!