Holiday food traditions

Just for fun this morning, I ran a little EYB search (Occasion: Christmas; Course: Main Course)  to see what holiday proteins our cookbooks feature.  The results read like some kind of crazy, carnivorous 12 Days of Christmas (I know I’m leaving out our vegetarian friends here): 

• 85 beef joints
• 82 whole turkeys
• 81 pork joint
• 77 whole ducks or geese
• 62 hams, cooked or not
• 43 roast chickens
• 24 lamb roasts

When I stepped back in the holiday menu to check, I saw there were 876 Christmas recipes to 45 Hannukah recipes, which pretty accurately reflects the somewhat goy-oriented state of cookbook publishing.

My own holiday meat of choice this year is going to be a roast goose (a somewhat fetishistic object for me, as detailed in A Spoonful of Promises).  That’s Christmas Day. On Christmas Eve I’m going to my cousin’s house, where my contribution to the pan-Chinese feast will be some kind of pork belly, probably red-cooked.

On both New Year’s Eve and Day, dumplings will be on the menu at the households of two different sets of friends, neither of them Chinese.  Go figure!  I’m just happy I won’t be the only one folding and wrapping my way through a hangover, the way it used to be years ago before we knew many people here.

At some point this week I’ll also be “secretly” making my husband his  chocolate-covered orange rinds, which are a sort of private joke within the family because the whole thing is so not a secret.  I even put them in the same candy tin every year. I wrap the tin before putting it under the tree, but it still rattles in an obvious, familiar way if you pick it up.

What’s your holiday food tradition?  What food is it not Christmas without?  Are you hosting or bringing? And while we’re at it, what’s your favorite day-after remedy?