My Wee Little Christmas Dinner Tradition

Well, here comes a lovely coincidence! Elucidation follows.

So after I played a major role in getting my mother and my father remarried back in 2012 (after 32 years of divorce, and if I've accomplished nothing else in this lifetime, I have accomplished that), I decided that a new Christmas tradition was in order. Decades before that, I came of age under my evil, abusive and roundly despised stepfather, who always insisted that we eat honey baked ham and turkey for Christmas. I hated him, and that loathing spread to honey baked ham and turkey for Christmas...psychological association and whatnot. With Mom divorcing that old buzzard, me moving back to Texas to be with Dad, Mom coming to Texas to visit me and everything else that followed, I decided that it was time for the Age of Honey Baked Christmas Ham to die and be buried once and for all.

But we had to eat something for Christmas dinner, right? So then it hit me: When I moved back to Texas in 2007, I celebrated my return to my real homeland by grabbing my copy of the Cowboy Cookbook and picking a recipe to cook for Dad. I opted for the Irish Stew, a recipe which settlers from Ireland brought with them when they emigrated to the young United States of America. Hoping for land and homes of their own, many of those Irish settlers joined the Westward Expansion into the frontier which would become the Midwestern United States, and with that came Irish wagoneers, Irish cowboys, Irish ranch hands and Irish every other walk of life on the frontier. And Irish stew — cooked from chopped veggies and mutton (though veal or pork made ready substitutes if lamb and mutton weren't available) — became a common dish served up in many a chuck wagon from there. So Dad and I cooked about a gallon of Irish stew, and it was great; we certainly didn't mind eating those leftovers for a day or two afterward.

From there, it seemed like expanding our horizons into the international kitchen could lead us away from stale old traditions and into the excitement and pizazz of culinary adventure. Granted, it's largely true that we Americans aren't very learned in geography and global politics, and much of that can be laid at the feet of our Congress and our elected (mis)representatives, endlessly stripping funds from our Education department and funneling them into anything from the Armed Forces to that million-dollar creek around Senator John Kerry's country house. While our shoddy public education system may be the result of mere Governmental thoughtlessness and incompetence, if I were to attribute any degree of malicious cunning to them, I would strongly suspect that our Government was doing this on purpose; stupid and uneducated people are easier to control (and easier to convince that the career politicians who have been ravishing them over a barrel for the past four years have actually been good to them and therefore deserve to be re-elected, again and again and again...), after all.

Fortunately, I have two edges on my side: 1) an elementary education in a private Catholic school (which did a great job of educating me, despite their daily attempts to force Jesus down my throat...) and 2) four years of Active Duty in the United States Air Force. The men and women of our Armed Forces are strongly encouraged to keep a thumb on the pulse of international relations, current events overseas and the global stage in general, because as world history has taught us time and time again, today's allies could become tomorrow's enemies, and vice-versa. How many of my fellow Americans know that we more or less invaded Algeria and Macedonia during the Clinton Administration (under which I served as a Senior Airman)? Not many; it was kept pretty hush-hush and was easily drowned out by the big, loud brouhaha with our five widely publicized campaigns in Bosnia (which happened despite most of the European Union saying, "Don't worry, we have this, we can take down Milosevic ourselves," but President Clinton was pigheaded like that). So I like to think that I know a little bit more about all of you non-Americans and your ways of life than the average American does. Don't hold it against me, now.

So anyway, after confering with Mom and Dad and weighing in with our respective opinions about various nations overseas, we decided to pick one nation on this planet and cook up a dish or two from that nation's cuisine; that would be our Christmas dinner. And lo, we decided on France.


Then another year passed; out went 2012 and in came 2013. This time, we decided on a novel way of picking a nation at random: I popped my little globe off its axis, I spun it around on the floor and then, without looking, I stopped the globe and poked a random spot on the globe with my finger; whichever nation I was poking would supply our next Christmas dinner. We ignored the obvious problem with the relative sizes of Earth's 200-odd nations; with the globe-spinning method, you might pick Russia, China, Canada and the USA dozens of times, while tiny nations like the Pitcairn Islands, Bermuda and Liechtenstein would never get picked. (Not that Liechtenstein is worth noticing anyway, mind you.... )

Heedlessly, we continued. The first three spins had to be discarded; as I recall, those spins resulted in the Pacific Ocean, Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf and the Pacific Ocean again. Then with the fourth spin, my finger ended up in South-Central Russia, just a hair north of Kazakhstan. So Russia it was!


Borscht is a pretty versatile beet stew; as long as you have the beets and the beef broth, you can ad hoc the rest. The sour cream topping is optional but strongly recommended. But we opted out of the traditional pairing of borscht and vodka, seeing as all three of us have tried vodka and none of us liked it. So we harkened back to France with a delightful semi-sweet cabernet instead.

But though we thought very highly of the borscht (to the point that we couldn't decide whether it was better than the previous year's ratatouille), we were all too aware of Russia's resounding victory over my little spinning globe. So we needed a truly randomized nation picker, one which treated all nations equally with no regard to land size, population or other such concerns. By the time we found what we needed — this Random Country site — we had already come up with a plan on what to do if we actually ended up picking our own nation, the United States; we would simply cook cuisine from a part of the nation from which we rarely if ever ate, such as homemade Manhattan Clam Chowder or Creole Alligator Etouffeé.

But we didn't have to worry about that for the Christmas of 2014, because Random Country picked Poland.


Pierogi is another highly versatile dish; it's basically Old Poland's predecessor to the burrito or the Hot Pocket. You just knead the dough, knead in some salt and maybe a few choice herbs or spices, then load it up with whatever you want...beef, chicken, veggies, catfish, you name it. Mix in some chopped green onions and shredded cabbage, then you fold the dough together left, right and up, and voila! You have a pierog. Then you just drop the pierog into a pot of boiling water and let it boil for about ten minutes, then strain it out.

Variety is the spice of life, so we made some of them vegetable pierogi (heavy on the cabbage and carrots), some of them pork pierogi, some of them chicken pierogi and maybe three shrimp pierogi. I really need to dig up those photos; the pierogi weren't as good as the borscht or the ratatouille, but we agreed that they were still pretty sporkin' good.

So the next year came, and we learned that Random Country is not infallible after it picked Bahrain. Bahrain is basically a little sandlot floating off the coast of their big brother, Saudi Arabia. As such, Bahrain doesn't produce anything for food, they don't produce anything for industry...there aren't even enough trees in Bahrain to cut down and build into fishing boats, so they can't even go trawling for fish! And if there's one thing that Bahrain does have, it's beachfront property and ocean. So Bahrain's income stems chiefly from wealthy Saudi Arabians on vacation, because that's all Bahrain is good for: it's just one big beachside resort. Naturally, as a result, Bahrain doesn't have their own cuisine; they just eat whatever the Arabs sell to them.

[Skirting around the character limit right quick....]