Italian Christmas menus

Candied dates smeared with butter, dried figs stuffed with walnuts, trays of hazelnuts, almonds, pecans and dark Brazilian nuts. Bread crumbs, cracked nutshells, bits of leftovers, empty espresso cups and wine glasses, and curled up mandarin orange peel scattered on a bright red embroidered tablecloth.

That’s the image that comes to mind when I think of Christmas Eve dinner at my mother’s house. The annual battleground after the seafood-based feast known as cenone della vigilia.

Earlier in the day the kitchen vibrates with joyful activity. We cook, drink, laugh a lot and throw food at each other, authorized to make a mess. We do it all together. We prepare the Christmas Eve dinner together, we eat it together and together we express our love for each other exchanging little thoughtful presents after midnight Mass. When my son finally falls asleep, we tiptoe into the house's many hiding places and bring out Santa's booty. We eat the snack left out for him, leaving evident crumbs and soot footsteps coming out of the chimney. And we smile in his same adorable anticipation. And that's when it truly feels like Christmas.

I kept wondering why I was having such a hard time getting into the Christmas mood this year. I tried everything: decorating the tree, building the presepe, putting up ornaments and lights all over the house, playing carols, baking cookies, constructing a gingerbread house... I included my son in all these usually infectious holiday activities because, after all, that's who I was doing it all for. But it wasn't really working. Something was missing.


And then I figured it out. I understood that there wasn't anything missing, there was actually an excess instead. There is too much of everything. Excessive frantic driving through traffic for last minute shopping. Too much constant mad rushing to conquer ground (and parking space) in horrible hysteria-mode stores and malls. Had the holiday season been reduced to racing brawl-prone folks laden with gift-wrapped boxes to the best deal? That's not Christmas! Christmas suddenly had turned into a commercial operation, and I somehow had forgotten its real meaning. To me Natale was a moment of excitement, of preparation, of joy. A traditional festive family occasion.

This shouldn't sound like a sermon, but very few things are sacred for me and Christmas is one of them. Nowadays Christmas in Italy is all about getting the perfect gift, leaving for the ultimate exotic vacation (and then bragging about it), accumulating rather than un-cluttering. Il Santo Natale–the holiness of Christmas–has been transformed into a display of money, image and opulence rather than a domestic celebration. It's a little sad, isn't it?

Thankfully the one element of Italian Natale that will never change is getting the family around a table and eating like crazy. So tomorrow evening, the dining room will be alive with chatter and laughter. After the gargantuan meal, the venue will convert – like every year – into casino royale for the Italian ritual Christmas gambling and tombola (bingo) tradition. The crumbs and nutshells get swept off la tavola with one tipsy motion and the games will begin. Usually one cousin – appropriately nicknamed 'the taxman' – always wins every game, pocketing all our invested coins, so after a few rounds everyone gets up disgruntled, belching and unzipping constricting garments. Someone always volunteers to do the monumental pile of dishes, and politics are rarely ever overlooked in the conversation. We have been known to fight occasionally on Christmas Eve for that reason. But we also stick to tradition, and play, laugh and eat ourselves into a stupor.

Like every year, my mother will be Grand Supervisor of the Christmas Eve banquet, which will traditionally include fish in its multi-course menu and copious amounts of wine, bubbly and happiness. We all help out and contribute our share cooking with her.

Needless to say, pre-preparation has already started. I am in fact posting this in a break during busy kitchen work.

This year we will be serving our Christmas Eve Dinner guests (old friends, immediate family and additional boyfriends, girlfriends, ex-spouses and the like) the following menu:

Smoked salmon canapées
Fritto di paranza (small fried fish)
Lasagna with Taleggio, mushrooms and shaved white truffles
Steamed European Sea bass with homemade mayonnaise (12 eggs)
Broccoli rabe rustic pie
Escarole rustic pie
Insalata di rinforzo (Neapolitan boiled cabbage, Greek olives and anchovy salad)
Artichokes "alla Romana" (added at the last minute)
Panettone, Pandoro and mixed nuts, dried figs and dates
Champagne Veuve-Cliquot Rosé
Rosso di Montalcino
Greco di Tufo
Limoncello
Amaro
Homemade myrtle liqueur

But Natale here in Italy is a two-day celebration, so...

The Christmas Day Lunch (for seating capacity reasons, always held at my mom's house) menu will feature:

Tortellini in brodo made with 3 kinds of meat/bones
Crown lamb roast and oven-baked russet potatoes
Guinea-fowl breasts stuffed with chestnuts and truffles
Radicchio, pears and gorgonzola salad
Panettone and Pandoro
Seasonal fruit platter
Chianti Classico
Passito di Pantelleria
Mandarin oranges

I have the oven blasting at 350°F and the smell in the house is delicious. My apron is spattered and Mr. E is wearing a Santa hat with flashing red lights. He's helping me mix ingredients. Rosemary Clooney is singing her carols for us through the sound system, and tree lights twinkle.

Something inside is tingling. I may have just found my Christmas spirit...

Presepe and croccante, Christmas in Rome

The painted turn of the century merry-go-round or Bernini’s Four Rivers fountain? Dodge the man on stilts or drop a coin in the hat by the flame eater juggling torches across the street from the Brazilian Embassy? Get a chocolate tartufo at Tre Scalini first, or stroll past the shooting gallery?

Every year, come Christmas, I never know where to start in Piazza Navona. Fifty-odd stalls of every kind line the piazza’s perimeter. The aroma of caramel burning from the croccante vendor is intoxicating. The typical holiday season hard, caramelized slab with mixed almonds and hazelnuts, made by spreading the candy out onto a cold greased work surface and cutting it before it hardens with a huge knife, leaves the unchanging flavor of Natale stuck to my teeth.

Santa Claus–whose name here is Babbo Natale–and the Befana (an old woman who brings gifts on January 6th–the Epiphany–aboard her flying broom) sit side by side on a stuffed reindeer-drawn carriage and children drop letters in their lap.

I rush over to the kind old man that sells nativity scene statuettes. He recognizes me every year when I pass his stall, or perhaps he is just very polite. My son picks out his shepherd, and we get sucked back into the vortex of lights, laughter, cotton candy and Christmas spirit.

Il presepe is a miniature Bethlehem. December 8th is crèche construction day here in Italy.

The Christmas tree is a late addition to Italian seasonal celebrations. The home built nativity scene with flour dusted brown paper bags as mountains, a pocket mirror as a duck pond and pin holes punched in blue cardboard for a starry sky above the cork covered manger was my thing as a child. It got built early on and taken down the day after Befana. Only recently, fueled by my son’s natural and bubbling Christmas spirit, have I begun constructing a Nativity again. Many parts of it are edible.

The first thing to do is collect the moss, which will carpet the model Bethlehem village flooring. We usually take a nice hike up by the Bracciano Lake or the Manziana forest in the outskirts of Rome on the weekend, and return home with a little patches of green velvet, and high on clean, crisp winter oxygen.

The next step is elevation. The construction needs to be visible and not get tripped into during festive dancing or galloping around the house. We raise our presepe on an old, chipped dessert trolley, which we keep in the cellar and wheel out annually for the occasion.

We then proceed to lighting, this is the trickiest part, since it needs to be well planned. Each little house and strategic site needs a light, so untangling Christmas lights and arranging them accordingly is very important.

We then build mountains, hills, a riverbed and whatever our fantasy landscape requires. The mountains are brown paper bags, the hills get covered with our precious moss, the stream is a strip of neatly cut aluminum foil. We scatter the little houses in increasing size, the little ones in the back, and the larger ones in the foreground, for optimum perspective, ending with a prominent manger. Cork lines the rooftops, while flour, styrofoam and cotton wool act as snow.

Then the village starts to populate with a variety of characters, each picked carefully and placed in a strategic position. There have been books written on how to build the presepe, and each character statuette has a meaning and a purpose. The Holy family of course, is the starring cast. You must leave the straw filled manger empty of course until Christmas Eve, until the Babe’s birth; include the fishmonger in her turn of the century costume, holding up her basket of symbolic fish; the chestnut seller, with a light shining through his little stove reproducing the embers; the shepherds and their flocks of sheep represent the believers gathered for the miraculous birth; the steer and the donkey and a few scattered chickens, geese, palm trees, the comet over the cave and a duck pond turn our Nativity into a festive mixture of Israel, early 1900 Napoli and a snowy Alpine location.