Christmas Dinner

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

My family also celebrates a secular Christmas holiday, and when there are no kids around (such as my nephew, who is Jewish), we are more minimalist still.  With just my parents and M and me, we had a lovely quiet Christmas dinner (about 1 p.m.), pictured below.  You can see a leftover from my mother’s British upbringing—the Christmas cracker.  We have them every year, and they make a loud POP! and provide bad jokes, a toy, and a paper crown.  (Hit joke this year?  Why is an elephant big, wrinkly, and grey?  Because if it were small, smooth, and white it would be an aspirin…  Groan…)

Dinner was local lamb chops, bought through our Farmto City Wintershares program; another version of my crazy what-local-foods-do-we-have-in-the-freezer dish that included local mushrooms, lima beans, cranberries, and corn; non-local potatoes (we brought local ones for my folks to use, but my Dad had already started cooking the non-local ones).  On the right is a glass of sparkling cider.  Yum.

A side note about meat:  For the last two years, M and I have been vegetarians at home, and starting in March of this year became full-time veggies (or Cranks, as they are known as in England).  However, we were left with two holidays that seemed unimaginable without meat—Thanksgiving and Christmas.  For Thanksgiving, of course, there was turkey, and while neither of us had a serving at dinner, we both had a pinch (literally) afterwards.  But Christmas has always meant lamb in my family (oddly, my relatives who own an organic sheep farm in Wales told us they were having turkey today!).  So we told my parents we would eat lamb if we could get it from the Wintershares program.

In the end, however, I was amazed at how little I really needed it today.  I was a pretty respectable meat-eater up until two years ago (partly due to a high premium being placed on protein when you have cystic fibrosis), and when I decided to go (forgive me) whole hog this March, I never thought Christmas could be Christmas without lamb.  I’m not opposed to eating meat on principle.  I think I have a moral obligation to know the animal had a good life (closest to what it likes best—i.e. grass for cows) before it died, and I believe I have a moral obligation to think of meat as a rare treat, and not an every week, let alone every day, event.  However, I guess I’ve just lost my interest.  Ah, well.  I wonder what other people have thought about this?

Merry Whatever You Celebrate!