To miss the simple tasty Christmas food of my childhood.

[NotSoGloriousFood]

I'm old enough to remember Christmas family gatherings when mum didn't have the option of going to Iceland or M&S and everyone pitched in.
Simple but tasty spreads of homecooked meats, cheese, uncle Kens legendary pickled onions, Aunty's Gloria's beetroot chutney, Mary's green tomato chutney and pickled red cabbage, cheese (usually cheddar and Caerfilly) and homemade pasties and sausage rolls. Crisps were ready salted.
It was tasty, wholesome and real.
Desserts were all homemade. chocolate cakes, mince pies, trifle, Christmas cake.
Simple food shared together......no-one could forsee then what food would become.........ultra processed with long lists of ingredients.
I watch some of the Christmas food adverts with a heavy heart and wonder what we have done to food.

Nigella does a lovely black forest trifle too. Delicious!

My festive shopping list:

• Sticky Lasagnes
• Sticky Peas
• Sticky Disks (with hydrogenated dust)
• Spoon Meat
• Carbonated Dipping Jam
• Sticky African Waffle Biscuits
• Sticky Potato Pistols
• Chicken Lengths
• Skewered Fish Coils
• Fizzy Porridge Style Dipping Gravy

Under £4 for the lot:

You win the internet.

I hope your poem isn’t AI 😂

Well what does it matter what other people eat? You don't have to eat ready made food.

I don't remember everybody chipping in. The men didn't go near the kitchen.

I don’t really understand what you’re getting at.
Do you choose to buy all this stuff and miss the wholesome home made food of your youth? If so, that’s entirely up to you, no one is making you buy all the stuff on the adverts.
Or do you make it just like Uncle Ken and Auntie Gloria used to, and you’re just complaining about nothing?
Ultimately, I don’t get what your issue is, as all the things you listed in your post are things you can quite easily make nowadays.

Our Christmas is still like that.

We don’t really eat anything out of a packet apart from salted peanuts and maybe some celebrations or similar.

Try having allergies. You can't buy the processed stuff and you can't make non-upf alternatives. Problem solved!

If you still have it, why do you miss it?

I have to say, as someone who is a big cook because I have a lovely house with a lovely kitchen as well as the time, money, support and knowledge, but works with a very poorly housed and resourced population, this kind of middle class hand-wringing really irritates me.

Go spend some time with families in some of the unheated, mould-ridden, broken down flats with minimal cooking facilities in this country and then tell them how they should be doing things better.

Aside from crisps being all flavours possible, my Christmas is the same?

If you don't want ready-made foods then don't buy them?

Sorry I'm really confused what is going on with you? If you're hosting, make what you want. If you're not hosting, offer to take what you want. You're presumably an adult now, so you have the beauty of choice.

It comes down to time. We don’t have as much of it now because everyone works. My mum and grandmas were all SAHMs.

I cook from scratch and we enjoy it.......but I hate all the UPFs served up when we go to the inlaws etc.....

We still have a home made Xmas dinner.

you don’t have to buy ready made

So you miss the fact other people eat differently at Xmas now and don't have homemade food? This makes no sense OP 😂

Is this some kind of dogwhistle nostalgia AI exercise? It sounds just like those "times were hard but hearts were warm" Facebook group posts about the olden days.

I just did stir up Sunday with my own kids and had them make their little wishes while stirring the cake batter widdershins in this Year of Our Lord 2025!!! We've stashed chutneys and jams made from our garden produce and stuff we've foraged. There's sloe gin and nocino on the go in big jars. I'm frankly better at this than one of my grandmothers at this stuff. She loved a pre-done M&S spread even back in the 80s, and why not?! I expect she was sick to the back teeth of cooking for everyone and fancied making Christmas day easy on herself. No shade. We've all got a different idea of luxury.

My Dad loved cooking roast dinners right up until he died. We always said so he could take all the glory.

somthing from the 70’s that is surprisingly good,
dates stuffed Philadelphia cheese. 70’s buffet staple…well in our house.

Ohhh I missed you get served it at the in laws! The thread has taken a swerve!

I don’t buy any of that shit ‘party food’.

Christmas in this house means homemade Christmas cake, homemade mincemeat, mince pies and jam tarts, trifle, homemade chutney, cheese from the excellent cheese stall in the market, roasted chestnuts, red cabbage, roast potatoes and trifle.

The same menu you could have had a hundred years ago, except we also have to cater for the family vegan. One year I roasted a cauliflower 😂

My nanna was a bloody peril in the kitchen 😆 Well meaning, but a bloody awful cook.

But to the OP's point - growing up in the 80s Christmas dinner was turkey, stuffing, potatoes, carrots, brussels, gravy, plus Christmas pudding and a cheese board. Christmas dinner last year was exactly the same stuff.

Food advertising in the 80s offered ready meals, 'fancy' ready-made Christmas desserts, frozen vol au vents. Food advertising now does the same.

As so many others have pointed out, the ingredients for chutney, pickled onions, Christmas cake, baked ham are all still available.

So you don’t “miss” the home cooked food from scratch as per your title, as you still cook it for yourself?

I see those adverts and magazines advertising a lot of UPF and just ignore them.
We make as much as possible (not just at Christmas but on a daily basis) to avoid UPF. Not that I think it’s the devil but it’s certainly not ‘good’ for my body and I want to limit what my kids eat in the way of crap too.
I make sausage rolls at Christmas (and at other times of the year too!) and we make mince pies with mils homemade mincemeat with our own pastry.
Gravy, Yorkshires, whatever, as much as possible it’s all made from as many raw ingredients as we can.
I was on a thread a while ago about people stocking up Christmas cupboards and I just didn’t relate to any of it, it’s all long shelf life stuff filled with artificial (imo) rubbish - much nicer made at home, consume less overall and not left with tonnes of it for weeks on end either.
We just do Christmas how we enjoy it and don’t worry about how anyone else wants to enjoy theirs.
I do despair a bit (not in a hand wringing sort of way, just find it a bit bleak) about the ‘4 tubs of celebrations, 2 chocolate oranges, 5 boxes of mince pies and 6 tubes of Pringles and 3 boxes of after 8’s because they were on offer’ mentality - only because I don’t think eating that stuff is good value for anyone physiologically!
But I keep my opinions to myself in public because I’m not here to piss on anyone’s chips 😂

If you miss it, just…make it?

Your list sounds really weird. Never heard of anyone having this kind of thing at Christmas.

We have the same thing now we've always had: turkey and various vegetables. And so does everyone I know!

Yes I miss it when at parties and events. As a child all friends and family would serve similar homemade foods......now it tends to be the exception.

Beetroot chutney sounds like an abomination.

I cook from scratch. So does my sister. So do most people I know. I don't spend a lot of time looking at ads for food. I do like the M&S food catalogue for xmas - picked one up when I was home a week ago. It gives me ideas for appetisers etc.

I don't think any of us really realise the utter drudgery put on women back in the "good old days" to put a nutritious dinner on the table every day for as little as possible. My grandmother had 12 to feed every day - two sittings at the kitchen table. They were unsung heroes. For every uncle Ken merrily pickling an onion there were a hundred aunt marys putting a dinner out one damn day after another.

Not everyone has loads of relatives with their homemade offerings. It was always just my parents and I for Christmas and now it’s just my immediate family. We can make stuff if we like but especially with baked goods, you end up with far too much for three. Saying that, we do baked goods, just not massive Christmas cakes etc.