To miss the simple tasty Christmas food of my childhood.

That sounds as though you have sons and a husband to eat your lovely food.

Fair point but just seems a bit looking back at previous times as though they were perfect. They weren’t.

Really? Nobody is allowed to complain about anything without knowing the solution? Apologies , I missed that memo

Nope!

Cake is just for DH, and I make one for my brother’s family too.
Mincemeat I love, and I make mince pies, use it in crumble and in baked apples.
The jam tarts and lemon curds are for my DSes and DH.
The chutney is from summer’s green tomatoes and was made months ago.

I just really like cooking for Christmas!

Some homemade stuff is good and some is awful. Just because it is homemade doeesn't make it great.

Some supermarket stuff is great and others not so great.

At the moment I am looking at the two ends of the scale, Aldi and M&S and they both look fantastic.

Aldis seafood looks great to me. I won't be hooking any of that out of my pond and water butt.

I assume you're feeding hoards of people BlueEyedBogWitch. I stopped making Christmas cakes years ago as the three of us simply can't eat it all. Ditto Christmas puds. I'm a 50s baby and I remember my mother painstakingly preparing mince pies, Christmas Cake and puddings and sausage rolls. It was really hard work, let's remember that. She did make a mean cake but it would all be far too much for us now. I don't make jams and chutneys for the same reason and I suspect others are the same.
Obviously UPF isn't great but most people are just doing the best they can on limited resources.

You don’t have to eat the supermarket Christmas food if you don’t want to. I’ve started going a lot more basic with mine. Not because I’m scared of UPFs but because I find the fancy looking Christmas food never tastes as good as it looks. I usually do a buffet on Christmas Eve. I’ll roast a ham, get in some cheese and crackers, brioch, pâté, those little satay chicken sticks, Pringles, dips, that sort of thing. Mince pies are really easy to make by the way and you can freeze them.

With a cheeseboard and celery?

Meh I am 49 and we absolutely had a Sarah Lee gateaux or veinetta alongside the home made trifle (using bought lady fingers) things are grander and more expensive but pretty similar butchers are busy everyone reads good food and tries to make stuff frim
scratch with Jamie and nigella it’s not any different really.

My chief memories of 'home made Christmas food' was my mum spending hours in the kitchen, losing her temper, refusing to let anyone help but swearing about how much she had to do and thoroughly spoiling the mood of Christmas, year after year.

I made up my mind never to fall into that trap.

The problem is, there's no science to the debate. Auntie Joan's trifle was wonderful, kind of thing. You can make Auntie Joan's trifle but it won't taste the same because you aren't 15 in 1983 or whatever. It's far more to do with the idea of something than the actuality.

Well, there's no point wailing about societal change unless you have answers?

Honestly. I think distance and time lend enchantment here. But as people have said, you can always make your own. Christmas food was a lot of time consuming hard work for mothers in most families.

I do know what you mean, OP. I'm from a different country and the meat, fruit, butter, cream, veg all taste completely different there. The difference is incredible.

Have you had a bad day today?

What about the Sara Lee Black Forest one?

I do home made sausage rolls. Literally just puff pastry with sausage meat and half a jar of apple sage or sausage meat and half a jar of cranberry sauce And some grated orange rind. A lovely home baked ham. Pickled cabbage. Home made coleslaw. Home made sourdough or focaccia. A huge fancy trifle and cheese cake. ITs Brilliant and I love it ♥️

I'm disabled with a high support needs disabled teen. No support. I get everything from Aldi and it cost £50 .

Were not all privileged enough to be able to cook everything from scratch, but my children have never complained about the Christmas I manage to give, which falls entirely to me to provide.

😂

😂

My mother did Christmas dinner from scratch, dessert was a homemade Christmas pudding from my great-grandmother and later we had Christmas cake that she'd also made for us beautifully decorated.

We were under strict instructions to return the plastic decorations and jazzy ribbon along with the tin so that the following week we could have more cake, the normal weekly fruit one she send up to us via my grandfather.

I make Christmas dinner from scratch, my dd does the dessert usually a cheesecake, I supply the ingredients. Aga does the ham on Christmas Eve, it cooks the turkey overnight and the beef on Christmas Day so I can make proper gravy.

Everyone drooled over my absolutely delicious pork packed sausage rolls with a bit of chutney in them , which came actually from the very nice farm shop - they were so enormous I chopped each into 3 , warmed up and kept Schtum about them not being home made - because they really did taste like it - I guess they were- just not my kitchen!

This is why DH is an excellent cook! Half the people I know who are serious cooks are that way because of appalling food in childhood.

My best friend’s husband, a very good cook, puts it down to boarding school slop from the age of six, but my friend says his parents’ idea of food is putting a joint or a pheasant in the Aga and then taking it out and leaving it sitting around in the kitchen for long periods, often several days, then serving it with potatoes or between slices of bread, regardless of its state of decay or whether or not one of the dogs got at it.

We love to cook and almost everything is homemade. I'm lucky as I seem to be unusual on here in that I adore my in-laws, but by God, their food is horrific. My DH has zero memories of anything delicious from his childhood. Plain, overcooked and under seasoned into inedibility is their food motto. And he's another one with memories of at least one year of food poisoning for the whole extended family from an improperly cooked turkey.

They're lovely open-hearted hosts and adore having everyone but dread the food to the extent that we pretty much rejoice when we're at theirs and they decide to go with UPF-laden packets - with the exception of Minute Rice, which seems to be her go-to. WTF is that stuff?

I know exactly how you feel @EverardDeTroyes .

Another poster said you can buy it in M&S so I might have a look. Won't be the same as mum's though.