Welcome to FabulousFusionFood's Christmas Recipes — This is the first in my occasional series on festival foods and dishes. Though considered a Christian festival these days Christmas is basically the Northern European mid-winter festival in a different guise. There are Slavic, Celtic and Germanic versions of this festival and the Celts certainly had a mid-winter feast where they would eat all the season's surplus product. Partly this was to have some fun during the darkest part of the year but it was also meant as a way of blackmailing the gods. A case of 'if you don't bring Spring early we're going to starve and whose going to worship you then!' In many ways it's hardly surprising that just about every culture has some kind of midwinter festival. Here I'm presenting Christmas or Midwinter fare down the ages, finishing-off with all the recipes you will need for a traditional 'turkey and trimmings' Christmas dinner.

Christmas is such an important celebration in the Christian calendar that it is sometimes hard to remember that it has it's origins in the pagan midwinter festivals of the temperate Northern Hemisphere. Indeed, the British Puritans of the 17th century did not count Christmas amongst the Christian feasts and sought to have it expunged from the annual list of feasts. But Christmas as a midwinter festival has such ancient and deep-rooted traditions that even the puritans were unable to eliminate the tradition.

This is a continuation of the recipes listings for Christmas (the page in fact). With over 500 recipes in total, the recipes have had to be broken down into a number of individual pages, which you can scroll through below. If you would like to learn a little more about Christmas itself and the cookery traditions associated with it, then please go to the first listing page for these Christmas recipes for the main information page. Here you will get just a list of the additional Christmas recipes available on this site.