Christmas is coming, the goose is getting frightened

[venta]

The other day, I accidentally heard a bit of Terry Wogan on Radio 2. He was reading out something to do with overheard conversations, which involved the phrase "Well, is it really a Christmas dinner if it doesn't say 'chipolatas' (on the menu)?"

So, I'm wondering...

What do you consider essential for a Christmas dinner ? I'm talking the standard turkey-or-other-large-bird affair; if you go in for something different then please tell me about it in a comment, but don't shove it in the poll.

Also, this isn't a request for what an ideal Christmas dinner would contain (since the answer is clearly "all of it"). I just want to know which things must be present for it to be a Christmas dinner rather than a nice Sunday roast. For example, I'm a huge fan of pigs in blankets, but will settle for sausages and bacon.

If there are any Americans reading, maybe you should answer about Thanksgiving instead. I've no idea what you lot get up to at Christmas.

[Poll #888876]

Yes, I'm a fool. Brussels sprouts. Of course. They were meant to be in there, and you can't edit polls after the fact.

[*] I fear this one is a mystery to many people - we always have toasted breadcrumbs with ours. They're much nicer than they sound.

Comments

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Brussels Sprouts!

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Yes!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Good grief, how did I manage to forget!?

Yay for sprouts. I even like the little green bastards.

[lathany.livejournal.com]

I do too. But no-one else who I ever eat Xmas dinner with does.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

'Nother vote for sprouts here! They're practically my favourite bit!

[davefish.livejournal.com]

Well said that man! Other veggies should be turnip.

I've ticked bacon, but you were also lacking in ham.

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

I suppose I have to do elaborating now. Green things that aren't peas but no matter how traditional is it I refuse to eat the brussel sprouts... Lots of kinds of stuffing and sausage meat balls (which are either an other thing all together or another kind of stuffing).
I like roasting random things to make them taste nicer like carrots and peppers but I guess that isn't necessarily a Christmas dinner thing.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Nice icon, by the way - I've not seen that photo before.

[ar-gemlad.livejournal.com]

To be a Christmas dinner, it has to have sprouts and a lack of certain things compared to a 'normal' Sunday roast in my family:
No Yorkshire puddings
No mashed potato (apparently it's difficult to find a big enough pan for all the mash our family gets through...)
The wrong sort of stuffing (I like sage & onion. Generally there's something with chestnuts in at Christmas which I don't eat).

So, I actually used to prefer a 'normal' Sunday roast, and at Christmas I had to put up with prawn cocktail, turkey, ham, roast potatoes, carrots, gravy, parsnips, chippolatas, etc etc....
It's a hard life ;)

[ar-gemlad.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. Forgot to mention - I used the past tense because recent Christmases have either involved having a barbecue in Spain or eating with a different family, which has shown that some traditional things are not universal... (sausage meat stuffing is a nice tradition to adopt!)

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

Elizabeth: I sat down to Christmas lunch, and I ate roast turkey, roast potatoes, toasted breadcrumbs, peas, carrots...
Several voices: She's forgotten the Brussels sprouts!

Everybody (for certain values of everyone) hates them but Christmas lunch isn't complete without them.

On the other hand, I don't have a suitable icon.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

*applauds icon* that one is brilliant enough!

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

After eights - and Christmas pudding, of course! With somebody setting something on fire they didn't intend to.

[ar-gemlad.livejournal.com]

And slightly off topic...

I once overheard a conversation in a shop:
"Do you get black pudding at a champagne breakfast?"

[venta.livejournal.com]

Wow. You don't. But you so should.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

Oh, that reminds me, I've got a veggie black pudding in the freezer that needs eating up.

[timeplease.livejournal.com]

*MEMEMEMEME*

[timeplease.livejournal.com]

Er, that was supposed to appear a bit less desperate... I would accuse LJ but I think I can accuse my laptop just as well...

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I should like to make clear that in the absence of a way to enter general boolean expressions into your poll there are a lot of logical and and or operators and brackets involved in my response.

The other things upon which I wish to elaborate:

* Christmas Pudding (shame on your anti-dessert bias !)
* Insane quantities of alcohol !
* Crackers, candles, etc.

The only revision to Christmas after 15 years in the Southern Hemisphere

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

As for me, the key to dessert on 25 December runs this way:
Traditional Christmas pudding or plum pudding
Pavlova with fruit and whipped cream

By pavlova, I do not mean the abomination that passes for it in Pommieland.

Re: The only revision to Christmas after 15 years in the Southern Hemisphere

[venta.livejournal.com]

We have nice pavlova in Pommieland, though not at Christmas. Any rate, the mother served it to a Kiwi friend of mine and it appeared to pass muster.

Re: The only revision to Christmas after 15 years in the Southern Hemisphere

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

I'm referring to those thing retailers sell under the name "pavlova". There is, of course, nothing to stop people making pavlova that will bring smiles to anyone's face.

Re: The only revision to Christmas after 15 years in the Southern Hemisphere

[venta.livejournal.com]

Fair point.

Pavlovas shouldn't be capable of causing shrapnel injuries.

Re: The only revision to Christmas after 15 years in the Southern Hemisphere

[redcountess]

Oh yes, I miss pav!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Re: Booleans - you mean you'll have "peas & carrots" or "roast veg & stuffing" ? Do elaborate (further!)

Re: anit-pud. I'm not, anti-pud. As such. Just rarely have space for it :)

And I don't eat candles.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Re: my afflictions with commas and spelling in that comment - Oops.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I was meaning something like: "(roast potatoes || other potatoes) && (sausages || chipolatas) && ((turkey && gravy && stuffing && cranberry) || duck || goose)"

Apologies for any mismatches paretheses, but I'm not quite sad enough to launch emacs just to check 'em !

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Liberal Chris here says: "Whatever main meal of the day you have on 25th December is a perfectly acceptable de facto Christmas dinner, no matter if it's tofu souffle with cous-cous, and pernickety traditionalists may go and get themselves stuck up a chimney."

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

My aunt once served fish fingers to her family on Christmas Day, as a protest that she was not getting enough money for housekeeping. I was never clear about the details, but I don't think it was pretty.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

I actually think that roast beef is a perfectly acceptable Christmas meal...

[venta.livejournal.com]

So do I - or tofu, or curry, or whatever you fancy. It's just that I wanted to know what people's attitudes to the essential parts of the traditional spread were.

[cardinalsin.livejournal.com]

I don't do "it's not a christmas dinner unless" type statements (well, except possibly for roast potatoes - they really are obligatory) so I've just answered for what I in practice cook and eat at christmas.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

Oh, I do the whole roast dinner thing, but with a vegetarian protein portion. Have to have a nice dark gravy, so I go for onion.

Some of the Cambridge lot as having a Xmas dinner next Monday. I looked at the options and there's a fab sounding roast, but with dead animals, and a veggie dish with salad and boiled potatoes. And that's not a Christmas dinner - come on, I might be vegetarian, but I'm not a rabbit!

[secondhand-rick.livejournal.com]

It's not a Christmas dinner unless it's got:

Booze.

[eviltwinemma.livejournal.com]

Melon, Bird, Sausages wrapped in bacon, Pork (with lots of crackling, A LOT OF GRAVY, Carrot & Swede Mash, Crispy Roasties (Spud & Parsnip), Sprouts with Chestnuts, Stuffing balls, Pudding, Mince Pies, Cake, CUSTARD!, Brandy butter, Squirty cream, Lots of booze.

[secondhand-rick.livejournal.com]

Pork (with lots of crackling

I'm not going to point out your uneven parenthesising¹, but I am going to state that there are few finer things to put in one's mouth than decent crackling.

Mmmmm.

Crackling.


[1] - Fuck me, that turns out to be an actual word. Or at least it is in Yank, though obviously then it requires a zee instead of an ess. My SOED doesn't have it, so its validity in real English is on hold.

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

Here is a decent British source: http://www.chambersharrap.co.uk/chambers/features/chref/chref.py/main?query=parenthesise&title=21st

[mr-tom.livejournal.com]

Turkey. It's f#cking pointless and the Septics are welcome to it.

[redcountess]

Extras: off the bone leg ham, pudding with custard or cream.

Chipolatas wrapped in bacon etc. aren't a feature of Aussie Christmas dinners, which are otherwise fairly traditional, and people will have a roast even on the hottest Christmas days. I once went to a friend's for Christmas and they had cold seafod for Christmas lunch, and it was very nice but didn't feel festive!

When my Nana was still alive, we'd have Christmas lunch at home then have a family buffet in the evening at one of my aunt's or uncle's houses (Mum is one of 8 kids) that featured pav, home cooked fried rice, marinated chicken wings, etc.

[marjory.livejournal.com]

Back when my Mum was a kid, it was steak pie.

We tend to go for the M&S ready-whatevered turkey-thing plus chesnut stuffing. This is the more modular version of taking up a whole turkey for 4 folks and a house-beastie. Plus we all eat our sprouts, taters and parsnips. We are good.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

Turkey or goose or duck, not alkl at once. Benedict has admitted that he doens't actually like turkey - I previously thought he just really hugely liked duck - so I imagine that it'll be duck or goose for the next ten years or so. Goose this year, but I';ve never had goose before.

Also - roast carrots and onions, and sprouts, and I usually do sweet potatoes, but that's not obligatory.

Christmas pudding is also necessary.

Just to clarify (probably quite boring)

[j4.livejournal.com]

I think it "should" be goose, but I've never actually had goose for Christmas dinner...

For years and years my family had the standard turkey and roast vegetables thingy, and it was always my dad who cooked it (my mum having done the majority of the cooking for the rest of the year). Then a few years ago my dad (who'd never really liked meat*) went vegetarian, and the rest of us all said "Actually, we were never that keen on turkey anyway," so we went and found an interesting-looking veggie thing to do instead (I think it was some kind of nut roast, but nicer than 'nut roast' sounds!). But it wasn't so exciting that we felt we had to have it again next year, so ever since then we've done a different veggie thing each year, which usually means that we all have a frantic panic in mid-December** to find a recipe that looks interesting. (We had a very nice guinness-and-chestnut-and-mushroom pie a couple of years ago, and if nobody's come up with anything better in the Official Christmas Dinner Panic yet, then I might vote to resurrect that.) We're a family in search of a new Christmas dinner tradition!

Whatever it is, though, it has to be accompanied by roast potatoes, roast parsnips, sprouts with chestnuts, and carrots. :-)

* Actually, he doesn't really like food, but he likes meat less than most food.

** Which reminds me. Argh. Must plan Christmas dinner.

Re: Just to clarify (probably quite boring)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

We have a traditional veggie nut roast / mushroom gravy combo, which we liked so much the first time, we've had the same every Christmas since (about 12) -- happy to share recipe with you if you like!