There Is No "Official" American Christmas Dinner

Lower your fists, and let’s discuss this calmly. I’ll admit, I also was initially immediately defensive when my Northern Irish husband grumbled about the lack of a traditional Christmas meal to look forward to as we celebrate stateside with my family this year. But after bickering about this over our morning coffee, I began to wonder if he has a point— is there no official, ubiquitous American Christmas Dinner?

I think the easiest way to explain this, is by outlining for any Americans reading what a UK/Irish Christmas dinner entails. Having been with my British/Irish passport holding partner for over 12 years now, I’ve experienced a lot of UK Christmases, and I have to admit, they have their own special holiday magic over there and I think The Christmas Dinner™ plays a starring role.

The Menu

Let’s get into it. A traditional UK Christmas dinner menu will contain: turkey, stuffing, roast potatoes, gravy, Yorkshire pudding, cocktail sausages, brussels sprouts, and Christmas pudding and mince pies with custard for dessert. Now some families will put some slight variations on this menu, perhaps by roasting some lovely carrots with the brussels sprouts, or doing pigs-in-a-blanket or maybe putting pine nuts in the stuffing. But the basic scaffolding will always remain the same. The way I understand it, you can add things to Christmas Dinner™ but you cannot subtract.

So ubiquitous is this meal, that it permeates every part of Christmas culture in the UK. Once the clock strikes December 1st, every pub in the United Kingdom starts rolling out a Christmas Dinner special that contains a combination of the above menu. Some of them will be pretty basic, but nicer pubs will serve swankier versions too. If you’re looking for something to chit-chat about with someone you run into while Christmas shopping, it’s fairly safe territory to talk about where “has a good Christmas dinner right now.”

My husband and his best friend one year decided to eat a Christmas dinner every day in December leading up to Christmas, sometimes even going for two.

image via pinterest

As much as Santa Claus is a Christmas figure, so is the Christmas Dinner™ its own character. It appears in many a Michael McIntyre comedy skit, every UK chef or cook from Gordon Ramsay to Jamie Oliver will have their own version of a Christmas dinner special.

What’s more, everything non-Christmas, will be Christmas Dinner-ified for the month. Tesco meal deals will feature turkey sandwiches with stuffing and cranberry. Crisps will be rosemary and apple cider vinegar flavored. Don’t even get me started on Waitrose and M&S during the holidays. Okay, actually do.

For the uninitiated American, Waitrose and M&S are kind of like Trader Joe’s but imagine it even better and more bougie? So they will have their own name brand versions of things and roll out new tasty treats, crisps, desserts, biscuits, chocolates, drinks, cheeses, etc but during Christmas its like if Buddy the Elf and Gordon Ramsay opened a grocery store together— a mixture of delicious, chaotic cheer, that somehow is always the best food you’ve ever had.

I feel like I’m not explaining this well, so if you’re from the UK please help me in the comments describe these grocery stores during the holidays.

Images via www.klfoodie.com

Christmas Dinner™ also plays a pivotal role on Christmas Day. The order of events go— Christmas morning you get up and open presents with your own family, before everyone has a cuppa, gets dressed and gathers for Christmas Dinner for the rest of the day.

The day after Christmas, Boxing Day, you eat sandwiches made of the leftovers* and go on walks in large groups to try and shift some of the copious amount of cheese and roast potatoes from the day before.

Christmas Dinner in America

So the obvious line to draw from UK Christmas Dinner to the US is our Thanksgiving meal. It has many of the same hallmarks: a bird, potatoes, veggies, in general a day of great feasting. Everyone basically makes the same meal featuring their own family’s recipes and we bond over candied yams and pecan pie.

But this means, on Christmas Day, the menu is a free-for-all. For example, in my home growing up, we always had slow roasted beef brisket and mashed potatoes or ham and mashed potatoes depending on which grandparent we were celebrating with. While ham is a fairly common choice, I don’t think it’s so wide sweeping as to be a national phenomenon. In fact, I think Christmas Day food is way more breakfast oriented entirely. Cinnamon rolls, stratas, egg casseroles and the like are much more common.

If you ask people what they eat on Christmas Day, you’ll get a range of responses so diverse it could only possibly be American— tamales, Chinese takeout, ham, chicken casserole.

Only In America

On the one hand, I can’t help but feel it’s a bit romantic that we all have our own unique family food lore on Christmas Day. But on the other, what do we lose by not gathering around a single tradition?

Historically, Christmas was a very religious holiday in the States. Much of our collective traditions were around church-centered activities— nativities, carol choir concerts, church Christmas specials, Christmas Eve service, etc. But while Christianity is obviously still huge in America, it does feel like most the holiday traditional activities have moved away from being religious.

In recent years, I tend to think of Black Friday and Starbucks red cups as ubiquitous holiday harbingers, which depresses me if I’m honest.

Eating food together to mark an occasion is so deeply imbedded in our human cultural DNA. Thanksgiving, especially given its extremely problematic historical roots, is only meaningful because we all take a moment to break bread together.

As much as opening presents on Christmas morning is magical, do we lose something a little by not gathering around the table to eat a specific meal?

Does it even matter?

It does to my husband, which is why we’re going to be making what my family is now calling “Irish Christmas” dinner. And I’m glad we are.

The night before, Christmas Eve, we’re having tamales and tequila at midnight with my sister’s Guatemalan family.

My grammy’s brisket will still be present because we don’t know how to celebrate without it. And there will be cinnamon rolls and lots of cheeses.

To quote Nora Ephron’s fictional character Joe Fox, “We are an American family.”

g xx

* My husband asked me to add that some UK families actually have another entire Christmas dinner on Boxing Day to celebrate with the other side of the family.

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