To think serving a starter with Christmas dinner is unnecessary. And weird.

[Kavalier]

Am hosting DH's family for Xmas dinner for the first time this year. MIL always does a prawn cocktail starter and they will miss a starter if I don't serve one, so I will. I think it's very odd though. AIBU?

I am from a starter family normally prawn/salmon based. Last year was first Christmas at in laws and I was starving by the end of it. We had breakfast before we left for 2 -3 hour drive, no nibbles, chocs nothing when we arrived. Presents with cups of tea we have fizz in my family. Then roast dished up for us same size as normal Sunday roast. No stuffing or pigs in blankets as they had been left in the freezer. No pudding offered.

Am doing Christmas this year and would hate anyone feeling hungry.

No supper offered and we left at 7ish.

Luckily my sister let me know on the way home she didnt need all the cheese I had bought for boxing day so pigged out on cheese and biscuits when we got home! Luckily DH was just as hungry!

This is wonderful. We had prawn cocktail starter in our house as I was growing up. I have made it compulsory in mine - but I am the only one that likes it!!! Since I don't eat the turkey though I have a huge starter and the rest "have to have" a bit of the "cocktail - without -the -prawns" - we also have smoked salmon. It's just the way it is!!!!!

So YABU - but your Christmas and you are hosting so do it your way. Other people's Christmas traditions are always fascinating I find.

Ywbu to serve prawn cocktail . Starters are very necessary IMO! It's the time of year to stuff your face, wouldn't be right without a full three course meal.

We also go for the champagne and smoked salmon canapés option, sitting comfortably in living room up to an hour before the main course.

After main course, a walk before it gets dark, then Christmas pudding or alternatives (pie, ice cream).

Always turkey sandwiches and cold sausages, salad etc in evening.

My DH's family are prawn cocktail as starter enthusiasts - I think it's naff/retro but enjoyable at same time. But personally wouldn't go to the faff and blunt appetite with a formal starter.

Thinking about it you could say we have 3 course meal. Smoked salmon and champagne in the morning while opening or just after opening presents, then a huge dinner about 1pm which leaves me too full for pudding so I end up having pudding around 5 is. Often followed by cheese.

There's no way of saying this without sounding like an arse, but I sort of thought of prawn cocktail as being a joke starter, like a glass of grapefruit juice. How have I never been offered a real prawn cocktail in my life!? I feel excluded from this collective experience, and may console myself with PC crisps at lunch.

No, PC crisps are nowhere near the same. What can be better than crisp shredded iceberg lettuce, big fat juicy prawns smothered in good Marie Rose sauce, a sprinkle of cayenne, lemon wedge, and some brown bread and butter - prawn cocktail served in a glass, natch.

Wonderfully council dahling

I wouldn't like the prawn cocktail, but we always have a starter. We've had pheasant canapes the last couple of years.

It does sound very 80s, the prawn cocktail, or it it 70s?

It was beautiful, wasn't it??

Shit, this thread has just made me realise that I was planning to use the same bowls to make the prawn cocktails and individual trifles in .

I don't care about what food is in and out of fashion. Things like trifle and prawn cocktail make people happy and surely that's what it's all about?

I served cheese and pineapple on sticks on a buffet in the summer without a hint of irony and people loved them and they were gone in about 5 minutes.

Nope - have never had a starter as part of Christmas dinner. Not necessary at all with all the other stuff. We have sherry trifle for dessert then liqueurs and homemade chocolates. Wouldn't have room for that if we'd had a starter.

I'm not sure if anyone has suggested it already, but why don't you ask your MIL if she could bring a batch of her lovely sauce for the prawns? That'll save you a job and she'll feel included. The danger is she'll just give you her recipe.

Of course you have a starter!

We have soup - usually made with bits and bobs from the turkey/veg.

I am aghast at the naysayers.

Christmas day is:

chocoate/chcoclate bricoche/bucks fizz for breakfast

Lunch of soup, main course and Christmas pud.

Chocolate until bed time.

If you're not doing it like that you are, without a doubt, DOING IT WRONG!

My parents would be outraged to not get a starter on a Saturday or Sunday let alone not have one on Xmas and Boxing day. But i just don't recognise the gorgefest of everyone elses xmases. We have never had nibbles, selection boxes or any other horrible stuff like that we just aren't snackers at all and don't really eat sweets. And our dinner is never an enormous gut buster either. It is just a normal serving of food like any other day. It's just posher food.

Our starter would be a crab, prawn or lobster salad of some kind. Main would be duck or goose with apple, celery and orange stuffing. Dessert would be xmas pud (just to be festive, don't think anyone loves it). Then cheese board.

My mum's xmas dinner is her 70's version of this: Prawn cocktail and Duck a l'orange. Boxing day is pate, beef wellington and ginger trifle.

At mums no one eats breakfast but at ours i do eggs benedict with lovely big duck eggs mmmmm (i may prefer that to the dinner actually).

Oh yes, and champagne from the moment you wake up, dinner in the evening and no telly!

Hotels do a starter before the main Christmas meal so perhaps this is the way is 'should' be done? I'm in a group booking for a Christmas lunch and am having butternut squash soup before the turkey. I haven't ordered any further courses though because I know I'll be full.

I love these sort of threads. Christmas traditions certainly do bring out the 'if you're not doing it like me then your Christmas is wrong'

I have fond memories of sharing a Christmas in Australia in doctor's quarters with three alpha (British) females all trying to organise what we were going to eat. I tell you the disagreement over parsnips almost came to blows. In the end we had to have parsnips prepared in two different ways. There was absolutely NO COMPROMISE to be had over how one has parsnips on Christmas Day. The whole day would have been ruined RUINED!! without roast parsnips/baton parsnips tossed in honey.
I did the spuds.

My sister usually cooks Xmas dinner & we don't have a starter.

After all, someone usually gets chocs for xmas which means eating those in the morning as a kind of starter!

We get full up with the large main course anyway - which tends to be turkey, veg, gravy, stuffing, pigs in blankets; then there's dessert and none of us are big eaters really.

HappyAgain, there is no 'should be done' really is there, there are just traditions and what works best for each family?
This year I am not cooking turkey, I feel almost giddy with the idea that I'm not going to have to fanny about and wrestle with that giant beast of a bastard bird. After last year's brave venture into not succumbing to the tyranny of snazzy sprouts I'm on a roll with the food changes.

Slubber Someone didn't want Christmas dinner roast parsnips outrageous!
This is why no matter where we are I do honey roast parsnips. If you want me to join you, you must accept me with my parsnips.

We never have a starter. The main christmas dinner is enough as we usually have a massive plate full. If I had a starter it would take the edge off my appetite and I would struggle with my main. Saying that I never have a starter when I go out to eat for the same reason.

Christmas dinner weird I meant Honey roast parsnips

I know it is ridiculous. Yet I do feel strongly! When I've had to have a starter before Christmas dinner, I feel really miserable. It does ruin it because I can't enjoy my main course like I would otherwise.

I suppose Christmas is stressful and the food is something to look forward to. If some numpty insists on doing it a way you hate, it can give you the rage!

My mum's christmas traditions are set in stone. Thank god I've long since stopped going to her, it was awful. I still shudder at memories of childhood/teenage christmases with the miserable, cracked and dirty old "best china" being wheeled out to hold 17 varieties of veg, different ways with potatoes, sludgy tasteless bread sauce and nasty gravy. It didn't matter that it was all freezing cold by the time you could eat it - what mattered was that ALL THE REQUIRED TYPES OF VEG AND SAUCE WERE PRESENT!

She still makes dozens of absolutely vile, bitter-tasting, dry, rock-hard christmas cakes and puddings in about May and tries to foist them on everyone she knows, even going so far as to post them abroad, her poor friends. We have tried and tried to get removed from the pudding list but we always get one. We have to ceremoniously dump it in the bin.

There is absolutely no possibility of her ever, ever considering making these things a different way or trying something new. The fact that they are revolting matters not. They are RIGHT.

This year is the first for ages where it's just the four of us. The kids won't eat a huge Christmas dinner so I'm seriously contemplating calling for a takeaway pizza or curry.

Lovely :)