Meal of the Year (Traditional Christmas dinner)

Member Name: colinllama

Product:	Traditional Christmas dinner
Date:	16/03/08 (66 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A meal to look forward for for 12 months!

Disadvantages: Have to wait 12 months for the next one.

Growing up, Christmas dinner was always THE meal of the year that I used to look forward too. My Mum and Dad used to do the same every year.

For starter we would have a prawn cocktail. The main course would be turkey, stuffing, chipolata sausages wrapped in streaky bacon, roast potatos, sprouts and generally ether peas or brocolli. There would always be some sort of desert, either mince pies and brandy butter, or Christmas pudding - but we would generally be too full for desert and this would be postponed a couple of hours!

A wonderful by-product of the main Christmas meal, that I looked forward to almost as much as the main event itself, was having turkey and stuffing sandwiches with pickled onions for tea around 7-8pm on Christmas night.

If I live to be 100, and eat another 70 odd Christmas dinners, I'll never eat one to top my Mum's I bet.

This past Christmas I got to experience something a little different. My girlfriend is Polish, and we spent Christmas with her family in Poland.

In Poland the big Christmas meal is eaten on Christmas Eve, rather than on the 25th. It is called Wigilia, and is very different from the traditional British Christmas fare.

The meal consisted of many small dishes, and was eaten buffet style. The majority of the dishes were made from fish, the most popular being fried spiced carp. There were also some egg and salad dishes that were very tasty. Desert was eaten later in the evening, and was a delicious layered cake called makowiec that with poppy seeds dried fruit and spices in it, almost like mincemeat, but not quite.

The highpoint of the Wigilia meal for me was my girlfriend's Mother's home made wild mushroom and pasta soup - it was incredible!

So I've experienced two very different Christmas meals, from two different cultures in recent years. They were both wonderful and special in thier own right, but what seems to make a Christmas meal for me is the company. Christmas is about spending time with the people that are important to you. If you have that, then the food is just extra.

Summary: Wonderful food, with special people = Christmas Dinner!