Thirty Days of Christmas; Day Six: The Food

This post is all about the food of the season, from the chocolates of the advent calendar to the summer sausage and cheese gifts that are so often desired. However, the one thing it will not cover is Christmas cookies. Those will have their own post later this month.

Now, let’s get those taste buds drooling. For as long as I can remember, we have had a ham for Christmas dinner. It is usually adorned with pineapple slices and has mashed potatoes and gravy, green bean casserole, rolls, vegetable salad, and pie alongside it. The best part of all that is the ham juice. It’s too thin to be considered a gravy, but it tastes of both ham and pineapple and is absolutely amazing.

I would like to diverge just a bit to talk about the vegetable salad we usually had at home. It has cauliflower, green olives, peas, carrots, onions and all of it is drenched in a vinegar sauce that essentially pickles the whole mass. It’s only good for about a week, but that week is probably the best week ever. I tried to make it for this group of friends once but none of them liked it. I learned later that it was the vinegar that they didn’t like. Of course, they didn’t tell me that. They just didn’t eat it, without the willingness to try it.

Let’s see… of course there’s all kinds of pie. My favorite was always pumpkin. I never liked cherry or apple and I’d never had pecan until I got married. After that, I learned that Hubby loves not only cherry but apple and pecan as well. I still don’t like cherry pie, but I will eat apple pie with cheddar cheese melted on top of it.

One year, we made Thanksgiving dinner for our friends. We were going to have a cherry pie, but we didn’t have enough filling. We did, however, have a can of apple pie filling so Hubby mixed them together. The turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and green beans were still there the next day, but the cherry-apple pie was gone in one sitting. I still don’t understand how or why they liked it. It was thrown together at the last minute while the rest of the meal was planned out.