Christmas Day would be better without Christmas dinner

[BackwardsGoing]

Presents, nice fizz, nibbles, smoked salmon on brown bread, chocolates, more nice booze, games, family, a walk, cheese board, Christmas telly. That's all that's needed for a great Christmas Day.

Cooking and eating Christmas dinner just takes up too much time and is too much work and leaves you uncomfortably full. AIBU that we should just leave out that part?

@ToffeePennie

And that’s exactly why Christmas dinner is on Christmas Eve in our house. Then we don’t spend 3hours + cooking a roast dinner, clearing up, feeling over full. And we were able to give 100% of our time to our kids!

Same here, Christmas Eve Roast at lunchtime, picky food in the evening. We then have a cooked breakfast on Christmas Day followed by a table laden with finger food for the rest of the day.

I love cooking but there's no way Christmas Dinner is 'a simple roast'. The preparation starts in October when I make the cake, the pudding is made in November. This year I spent the 23rd baking (we have a birthday and Hogmanay this week plus we have support bubbled with DBro so he's here), the 24th buying the last minute stuff (picking up the goose etc), then making brandy butter, cranberry sauce, and prepping the stuffing and all the veg. On the day once the bird is in the oven we open the presents and I pop out regularly to put in the next thing at the appropriate time. We have 6 rings and 3 ovens on the range so plenty of room and our youngest is 8 so things are a bit easier. It was harder when they were small, now the tweens help with the prep. We also have a big late brunch and don't eat dinner till 5pm so there's less stress to get things done in the morning. And there were only 6 of us this year which makes it more relaxed and today has been very easy. 2 years ago we had 12 people in the house for a week and that was horrendous. I did a cooked breakfast then 4 courses for dinner with about 10 sides for the turkey then got up on Boxing Day and had to start cooking a large meal all over again because there weren't enough leftovers for so many people.

I wouldn't want to do less, homemade food is the big thing at Christmas for me and some of the 'how to make it easier' suggestions sound soulless (reheated dinner in the microwave is not for me) but it took a good few years to get things right and I still prefer Hogmanay which is a more relaxed celebration.

I love Christmas dinner but did it Christmas eve this year and we all loved it! As we were only a small group I wanted to be able to spend time with the children rather than in the kitchen all day. It’s not usually so noticeable when it’s a big group of us as children are all running around together.
Could definitely be the way forward for us - no pressure Christmas day was brilliant!

I agree countfosco . I rarely do quite as much by way of sides for a normal roast dinner, nor in a normal roast dinner am I actively aiming to have a delicious selection of leftovers for the next day.

For me reheating a dinner cooked the day before is a bit unappealing - I'd rather eat it when it was ready the day before. I'm also not sure how that works if you have a ten or a dozen people, at 3 minutes per plate the first ones out would be cold by the time the last ones come out surely?

Since we weren’t hosting anyone this year we moved the big Christmas roast to Christmas Eve (and cheated with M&S for a lot of it) and had picky party food, salad and pizzas for Christmas Day. Was brilliant and much better and easier with the children- I’m a complete convert. In normal years we’d be too busy on Christmas Eve to be roasting things but it’s a definite Boxing Day plan for next year.

@BackwardsGoing

Presents, nice fizz, nibbles, smoked salmon on brown bread, chocolates, more nice booze, games, family, a walk, cheese board, Christmas telly. That's all that's needed for a great Christmas Day.

Cooking and eating Christmas dinner just takes up too much time and is too much work and leaves you uncomfortably full. AIBU that we should just leave out that part?

No. Christmas dinner is essential to the spirit and you are failing your husband and your children if you deny them this tiny bit of happiness in this horrendous year.

Christmas lunch is the favourite part of the day. Veggies prepped the day before and Alexa set with all the timing reminders.
All 3 of us really enjoyed it and we had it again this evening with fresh veg and cold meat. Tomorrow we will have turkey sandwiches and probably another meal with gravy and fresh veggies the day after!

Mine took no time at all. Bunged turkey in the oven in a roasting bag, bunged potatoes and veg in at the requisite time. Starter was pate and toast so took 3 minutes. Dessert was readymade pavlova (hate anything heavy) which took 5 minutes to serve. It is the best part of Christmas for me.

The only reason people all eat the same food on the same day in December when office workers are off, is because ‘everyone else does it’ 🥴
Eat whatever food you actually like, no point in labouring over some generic shitty roast for the sake of [nothing], have a gravy chip, who cares.

Recipes that tell you to ‘chuck’, ‘sling’, ‘glug’, ‘throw’ items make me want to puke. 🤣

A chef friend told me to only use the aluminium disposable oven trays. Means there's so much less washing up!

We had ours in the evening yesterday for the first time ever, which despite being completely unplanned was much more relaxed as not rushing about to do breakfast/presents/lunch before about 2pm.

@londonscalling

A chef friend told me to only use the aluminium disposable oven trays. Means there's so much less washing up!

Needless expense and waste.

YABU. Prep much of it the night before and it’s not too much work on the day. It gives a real focal point to the day after the presents have been unwrapped and after church (in our household).

I look forward to it all year! The ceremony of lighting the Christmas pudding etc is one of the nicer things to remember about childhood Christmas’s etc - I don’t want that on Boxing Day!

The ceremony of lighting the Christmas pudding etc is one of the nicer things to remember about childhood Christmas’s etc - I don’t want that on Boxing Day!

We always do that on Boxing Day if we're at home for Christmas dinner. The pudding doesn't get full appreciation on Christmas Day

I had beef this year because I don’t like turkey. It was the first year I have ever been at home and I loved the no rules way.

Ready prepped joint from Waitrose - Amazing!!
Ready prepped potatoes, red cabbage, potato gratin, ‘peas, bacon and leek’, pigs in blankets, Yorkshire’s, gravy - all Waitrose.

No prep, extremely tasty, 2 hours in the oven with other bits going in at the right time.

One other thing to think on: my DH grew up never having a Christmas dinner at all, then his Mum introduced one on Christmas Eve when they were teens, because every Christmas Day at 11am they’d head to his grandparents, where there were too many people and not enough room for a sit down Christmas lunch, so they’d have a buffet.

They grew up hating it. They were resentful that everyone else had a Christmas dinner and they didn’t, and the buffet was nothing special. The family get together would be like any normal family Sunday afternoon, and they don’t have great memories of Christmas childhoods. Sounds melodramatic, but it’s true. It wasn’t PILs fault; they just thought they were doing a nice thing having all the family together- but they never stopped to ask DH and BILs if they were enjoying themselves.

DH and BIL have both embraced the Christmas traditions of their in laws, and now love a full pm Christmas dinner. I wouldn’t do without it.

We had one but it was so easy because mainly oven cooked foods and micro veg. The meat and stuffing were cooked Christmas Eve.

I bought micro sticky toffee pudding for dessert with fresh cream.

It was delicious to be honest - all of it. And took very little effort. So that’s my compromise for Christmas lunch :)

We usually have our big dinner on Christmas Eve and then do a nice sit-down brunch of things like frittata, croissants, nice cheeses, fruit, and mimosas on Christmas morning. Everyone is ready for something nice to eat after the early wake-up and morning of presents, and a frittata is a lot less stressful to make than a cooked dinner, especially if you assemble it the day before and just bake on the morning! Then the rest of Christmas Day is cheese boards and lots of self service nibbles.

I don't mind making Christmas dinner. There's only so much relaxation you need in one day and chucking some spuds and a few parsnips in the oven isn't really that taxing.

If it doesn’t work for you, scrap it. For me, it wouldn’t be Christmas without turkey & all the trimmings, it’s an integral part of my day & makes Christmas “Christmas”

Another Christmas Eve roast here. Big breakfast platter mid morning christmas day and finger food/ leftovers later on in the day. We had tueky and ham pie and veg with leftovers on boxing day.

My DC are young and it's been lovely to actually watch them opening presents and playing with them, not popping into the kitchen every 15 mins to stick another tray in the oven or check how something is doing.

Yes, it's just a roast. Yes, we went through a stage prepping as much as possible on Christmas eve. But it's still the timings and turning stuff halfway, and spending time in a hot kitchen turning potatoes and checking on parsnips and asking someone to carve the turkey when I just want to be sat with my family