31 Days to Go. (Traditional Christmas dinner)

Member Name: katygriff

Product:	Traditional Christmas dinner
Date:	24/11/06 (6260 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Yummy!

Disadvantages: None.

I scared myself while at work the other day because I was organising December and realising that I actually only have 18 working days until I leave for the Christmas break. Now this year well actually just a couple of months ago I moved into my very first house so now I am sitting here and not only panicking about Christmas presents but also about Christmas dinner. I have come from a family who does it the same every single year and I am hoping to keep it the same even if it does mean I am going back home for Christmas and chickening out of cooking one myself. Within this review I will let you know what my family has as a traditional Christmas dinner.

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Cooking and Preparation:

Cooking begins usually quite early in the morning at about 7 am so that the turkey is completely ready by lunch time. The turkey is stuffed, basted and popped in the oven. My Mom usually uses fruit to flavour the turkey but I am sure everybody has their preferences. Then all the preparation takes place which is doing all the vegetables as they are quite time consuming. We have the following vegetables with our meal;

Sprouts
Potatoes – Roast and Mash
Carrots
Broccoli
Cauliflower
Leeks

These are all prepared beforehand as you might as well do them as soon as possible so that they are out of the way. Other preparation includes cooking sausages and making stuffing balls which are easy enough to do. We also have a food warmer which we leave plugged in so we can cook everything and then put it in there and it keeps it nice and hot all day for us so I will be getting one of those for next year.

Then of course we come to how you decide to decorate your table ready for the meal.

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Decoration:

We as a family like to go all out at Christmas and we have quite a big dining room table which is extended and a heat proof cover is laid over the top. Then during the Christmas period my Mom has usually bought some sort of Christmas table cover which last year was red with small snowflakes on if I remember correctly. She then also likes to decorate the placemats and one year we had autumn leaves laminated for them which looked quite cool and festive.

Then we lay the cutlery out as normal and we have the nice wine glasses which trust me is a bit of a treat at our house as we usually use 10p IKEA ones. Then my Mom will always put a Christmas themed candle in the middle of the candle to light which can be just a plain red candle as they look great.

The last bit of decoration we do which is a tradition of ours is cracker presents. You can buy special crackers that you put together yourself and then we buy small presents for people and hide them inside. As long as you put the persons name on the cracker then you can keep track of who has what. Last year however we put normal Christmas crackers on the table and then wrapped the presents individually and you are allowed to open them before you eat so it is nice for everybody to have a little something.

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Atmosphere:

At Christmas the atmosphere is usually great anyway because people have opened a few presents and everybody is in a good mood and looking forward to Christmas dinner. In our house we do go overboard and my Dad chooses to have very cheesy old Christmas songs on the CD player which I love. It is important to have a bit of music in our family as we like the whole house to just emulate Christmas.

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Starters:

Christmas dinner would not be a dinner without a starter as everybody should always have a proper three course meal. We usually have a choice of two starters at Christmas and they are as follows. The first is a melon starter which consists of a variety of melons sliced on a plate and occasionally we have some red berries to go with them which is absolutely lovely.

My favourite starter though has to be prawn cocktail and I actually do get a little bit disappointed if we don’t have it as I don’t have it all year around. It is so easy to make as well as you just need to cook some prawns, shred some lettuce and then pour seafood sauce all over it and it tastes delicious. We always have these choices and I know it is a little sad as we do really look forward to them a bit more than the actual main dinner. Yes before you ask my family is a little mad.

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Main Dinner:

I have already told you most of what goes into our dinner as we do stay very traditional and have exactly what you expect. Of course make sure you have your turkey, veg and more importantly stuffing ready to go and then always make sure you have enough gravy and cranberry sauce. The way we do our dinner usually is to have all of the food in the kitchen and let everybody help themselves and then have just the plates on the table. Because of the amount of people we have around to dinner we have to make sure there is enough room and this is the best way. Plus then a lot of things are in the kitchen so you don’t have to trawl them all through after eating.

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Puddings:

This is where we go mad in our family as we are all fans of desserts more than anything so we always have a great selection. The only thing we do not have usually is Christmas cake and this is mainly because it is in essence just a fruit cake and we are not big fans. What we do have is a Christmas pudding because seriously piping hot this is one of the nicest things you can eat especially if you get the really nutty ones which is what we do. Then make sure you serve it with brandy butter or cream to accentuate the taste to its best.

Then what we have which is not really that Christmassy is a nice chocolate gateaux because lets face it a lot of people would rather just have a normal Chocolate cake instead of the Christmas choices. Then we also have stolen which is a very Christmassy thing. It is like this pastry fruity thing with some spices in and to be honest I do not like it but it is not a true Christmas if we don’t have one on the table.

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Verdict:

So there you go that is exactly how we do our Christmas dinners and I do thin we stay to the common traditional way of doing things to a large extent. We do like to put out own spin on things though as it has become a family tradition everything that we do and we love it. One year we tried something different by changing choices in the dinner and not having cracker presents and everybody was so disappointed (including me) so I am glad things are back to normal now.

A lot of work goes into cooking a Christmas dinner and I admire every single person who does one every single year. As mentioned before I am going to my parents this year but next year I might have a go myself (well I say that now). Well anyway I hope everybody loves their Christmas dinner this year and if you are cooking I good luck and those that aren’t give the ones that do a hand will you.

Thanks for reading.

xxx

Summary: Love it.