kaberett | #21 Family's traditional winter holiday food

Well, let's see, there's the standard-ish stuff: every year my mother makes fruitcake and Christmas puddings, very kindly leaving out glacé cherries because I consider them an abomination, doing the marzipan and royal icing herself; Teebäckerei, whose recipe I have unaccountably failed to type up, which are biscuits with much of the flour replaced by ground nuts (usually a combination of walnuts and hazelnuts though almonds are also acceptable) and a small quantity of grated dark chocolate; as mentioned, my father makes around twelve dozen mince pies every year.

There is a Thing my mother and I started doing when we went hiking the summer after I turned 18, the summer before I went to university, the summer I decided I might be a geologist: we collected a small handful of cranberries and brought them back with us and froze them, and then come the Solstice and such we boiled them up with bought cranberries, on the general principle of holy water. (Er, for those less steeped in this stuff than I am: you add any amount of holy water to a vessel containing water that has not been blessed etc and the whole lot is rendered sacred. (This is a thing that never made any sense to me about Buffy: why would anyone buy multiple bottles of holy water! You just... add some more to the stuff you got out of the tap! Or like add it to the reservoir and BOOM. As it were.)

Other than that, the main traditional food is non-veg and as such I haven't eaten it in years. Take the internal organs of the bird you're roasting, particularly liver and heart; cook appropriately via frying (chopped small), and mix with caramelised onions and hard-boiled eggs; serve on motzah crackers. This came down the Jewish side of the family; being all secular or goy my family tends to butter the crackers before putting the thing on. This is honestly pretty much the only meat dish I miss.

Satsumas and clementines are a thing, from Heiliger Nikolaus on. Increasingly, cheese & crackers & port (my mother keeps getting asked to play the organ at weddings, which she detests because she is not terribly good at it, and being given nice port in payment).

Nusspotitze! That is also a thing that we make fairly regularly at this time of year.

And that is more-or-less that. If you would like me to elaborate on any points or discuss things I've failed to touch on, let me know! ♥

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alexseanchai

The thing which makes little sense about Buffy is a thing that makes little sense about Supernatural as well. (Because obviously you needed to know this.)

redbird

Serious though tangential question (to which I realize you may not know the answer): given the mechanism of holy water as described, how are all Earth's oceans not considered to be holy water? The hypothesis that nobody has ever poured holy water into a river that flows to the sea seems absurdly improbable.

kaberett

Because Magic And Handwaving, as far as I can tell. (Appropriate disposal involves dumping it on earth to be absorbed that way, which does a thing?)

Actually, come to think, I read a Supernatural fic with the premise of somebody did that—and also the premise of "holy water is devoid of salt". It was a pretty dark fic and there were a whoooole lot of dead fish.