Celebrating Christmas

[Gina]

How does every nationality spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day? What is your favorite foods,and tradition? I will start .

I am Italian American Decent, Christmas Eve is very big with the italians, On the eve we have buffet style dinner. We start off with appetizers , cheese & crackers, shrimp cocktail, all sorts of different appetizers. Then we serve linguine and claim sauce. We go to my side of the family on this night, and my sister in law makes all different dishes made with shrimp for we all love shrimp. Shrimp scampi, shrimp oreganta, and fried shrimps. There is calamari salad, sometimes she makes lobster tails with butter. But over the years she has cut down for you can eat only so much. We all bake for the holidays so there is plently of desserts. It is a night of eating,we use to sing carols and we still listen to Christmas songs, at midnight we wish each other a Merry Christmas, my sister in law's tradition since she was a little girl, her family would take the statue of infant Jesus from the manger and pass it around for all to kiss.To welcome baby Jesus we do that , and then afterwards we open up the presents, We usually get home late after 1:00 in the morning..It is a fun night with all family and friends dropping in.

Christmas Day is spent with my husbands side of the family, it is a quieter day, we head out in the afternoon after mass and spend another day of eating, lol usually this holiday we have homemade raviolis or lasagna, my MIL passed away a year an half ago, so its a little different without her. We exchange gifts eat plenty of desserts and head home ...