What is your family’s tradition for food and drink on Christmas Day?
One of my favorite Christmas movies isn’t Die Hard. It’s the somber and elegiac The Dead (1987), adapted from the novella by James Joyce. In both book and film, the story takes place at a holiday dinner in turn-of-the-century Ireland, before the Great War, when the island still was under British rule. Joyce’s tale has to do with many things both great and small, but his description of a table groaning with the Christmas feast is incomparable.
A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table, and at the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham, stripped of its outer skin and peppered over with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill round its shin, and beside this was a round of spiced beef. Between these rival ends ran parallel lines of side-dishes: two little minsters of jelly, red and yellow; a shallow dish full of blocks of blancmange and red jam, a large green leaf-shaped dish with a stalk-shaped handle, on...Read more
