What to Serve for Christmas Eve Dinner

Will you be preparing Christmas Eve dinner this year? Does the mere thought of such an assignment throw you into a panic? This special meal is super charged with the expectations, emotions, and the sentiments born from Christmasess past. Your family and friends anticipate a combination of delicious food, served with Christmas spirit, love, laughter and good cheer. This is the meal you'd like them to recall, with fondness, many years to come.

How do you make this happen? The late Lee Bailey, who wrote many books and articles about food and entertaining, including the books Cooking for Friends and Soup Meals, insisted that great meals require little fuss, but a lot of style, great taste, and good simple food. Your guests should feel comfortable, and you should reflect your unique personality through your offerings.

Nora Ephron, well-known author and screenplay writer, recalls a dinner at Bailey's house in her hilarious book, I Feel Bad About My Neck. She said Bailey wasn't pretentious about entertaining, but he was stylish, and made people feel at home. "He liked to serve the usual meat, vegetable, and starch, but always added a 4th dish unexpected, like little crabapples, a casserole of lima beans and pears, peaches with cayenne pepper, or little biscuits." This 4th dish's purpose is to match and contradict everything else on the plate. This 4th dish makes the flavor of the other foods, combined with its flavors, pop to memorable levels. Ephron said Bailey's guests always wanted to eat more, because both food and the company of friends was so much fun.

Your menu for Christmas Eve dinner has to be your choice. You want to pick food that matches both your personality and your skill level. The biggest cooking disasters come from trying to make a elaborate meal equal to those made by famous chefs, like Emeril Lagasse, when you've just learned to flip an egg! Pick an interesting and festive menu that you know you can handle.

A great resource for ideas and recipes is the Food Network. There you can find all types of recipes that are labeled either "easy," "medium," or "hard." Even an Emeril recipe can be easy, so don't feel limited by your skill level. Pick recipes that are fun and "do-able," using fresh ingredients available where you live.

People in the Northeast, for example, often have Oyster Stew for Christmas Eve dinner. Oysters are plentiful, and the stew is warm, filling, and festive. Oyster stew not only provides nourishment, but also reflects home and tradition. In the Southwest, homemade tamales and Mexican food make Christmas feel like a celebration. Look for recipes that use the foods unique to where you live and that you feel are right for Christmas Eve dinner.

Christmas Eve dinner can be light if a large meal is planned for the next day. A delicious, hearty soup, crispy bread, green salad, and a sliver of cheesecake for dessert is yummy, festive, and easy on sensitive stomachs. Soups such as White Chicken Chili, Creamy Leek and Potato Soup, and Oyster Stew are not difficult to make but still feel special.

A great salad is made with organic herb salad greens, spinach, tomatoes, colored peppers, black olives, avocado, cucumber, and dried cranberries. The cranberries are the ingredient in this simple salad that make the other ingredients pop with flavor, as Lee Bailey advises. The salad ingredients look pretty layered in a large glass bowl.

You can buy bread and cheesecake at a bakery, if you wish, or use an easy cheesecake recipe called Cherry-O Cream Cheese Pie. It is best made with fresh lemons a few days ahead, so its flavors blend.

Enjoy yourself! Christmas Eve is your big day, too. Don't worry if something isn't as perfect as you imagined it would be. What matters most is having a joyful time with the people you love. That's the legacy you most want to create and your greatest gift to family and friends.

"The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it." Ralph Waldo Emerson