Join a Kentucky family in their Christmas Eve celebration. Learn how to prepare and cook a family-centered meal that will impress all. Find recipes that have become a part of this family’s holiday tradition and enjoy a home cooked meal.
Join us December 20th at the Massa family farm and learn to make the perfect Christmas Eve dinner with these classes and recipes
About the Massa Family
The Massa family began in Illinois and has spread and grown to other parts of the United States. Older family members immigrated from Italy, instilling a love for food in many family members. The Massa family is your typical Midwestern family. Traditions such as making snow angels, cutting down our own Christmas tree, and making our own Christmas decorations are all things the Massa family partake in. Family meals are cooked and eaten together every evening, and spending time together is important. On Christmas Eve, these family traditions are exaggerated. To make this meal special we each prepare an individual dish, many times using a recipe from my Great Grandmother who was originally from Italy. She is the figurehead of our family, and taught us to love cooking and eating. Our family is religious, so Christmas Eve is a very important holiday for us. It is a time for our family to gather and work together preparing a special meal. On Christmas day we spend time at home with our immediate family to rest, so Christmas Eve is our day to celebrate the birth of Christ. Our family started out as a lower middle class family, but has worked and achieved more finical success. Because of this, our traditions were solidified. Our Christmas Eve meal is a reflection on this growth, and we take this time to be thankful and remember the hard work it took to achieve these goals.
About the Event
The Massa family is centered around food. Meals are the center of celebrations and create unity by sharing recipes and cooking together. By joining this event, you will get a glimpse into the folk practices and meaning of the foodways of a Midwestern Italian-American family. You will learn to cook the meals that family members have prepared for decades. A family member was quoted saying, “A lot of us use Great Grandma’s recipes, she was always the chef”. The recipes we will provide you with are our family recipes which have been passed down on note cards and scraps of paper for years. Great Grandma always focused on tradition. Her parents focused on Italian traditions when she was growing up, so she always felt left out with her classmates and peers. She wanted us to have traditional American holidays. While we enjoy Italian traditions throughout the year, holidays are a time to celebrate our success, and American traditions are the way Great Grandma taught us to do that. This is why we have chosen these recipes to share with our participants. Learning these recipes with us and cooking along side us will submerge you in our family story. In doing so, you will get an insight into the importance of preparing meals together in the Massa family. The Christmas Eve meal is a designated time and place from family members to gather and enjoy each others company. Family members have been quoted saying, “After dinner, we always make Christmas pies together. We make them from scratch, and use my grandmother’s recipe. Usually we make a rhubarb, a cherry, and an apple. This takes a long time, but we enjoy staying up late and catching up”. Holiday meals are a way that we catch up and share news with each other. When you attend this event and learn how to cook our traditional Christmas Eve meal, you will become a part of the family for the day.
This year’s menu includes:
The perfect Christmas ham
Extra cheesy macaroni and cheese
Sugar sweet Christmas cookies
The Importance of the Christmas Eve Meal
Christmas is a time of celebration and rest. Jack Santino (1994:11) describes Christmas as a winter celebration which represents the end of the year, and starting anew. This is because Christmas happens right after the winter solstice, which is the darkest day of the year. After this, days lengthen, symbolizing a new start (Santino 1994:11). This makes Christmas a time for gathering, which has transformed into time for families to come together and share a meal. Jones (1988: 242) describes the importance of food in our lives when they say, “People experience food directly and in interaction with selected others. Compelling influences, then, would seem to be found in the qualities that make eating unique and that inhere in specific situations of food preparation, service, and consumption”. On holidays, this is even more exaggerated. People spend the day preparing a meal together, setting a fancy table, and dressing up. The special traditions that people do on holidays shows a lot about their family, and their beliefs. When you join our family for our Christmas Eve cooking class, you will get an insight into our family. Herman (2019:4) says, “We eat, therefore we are. Terroir is experience and emotion, embodiment and immediacy, custom and invention, destiny and storytelling”. This quote highlights what food means to our family. The time and energy we put into the meal, the joy we have cooking together, and the traditions we carry shape our family story. You will learn a lot about our family and our Christmas Eve traditions when you see what we eat, how we prepare it, and how we spend the day together. By learning about other family’s customs and seeing how other families interact and spend holidays, you gain an important insight into your own family and traditions.
The Meaning Behind the Food
Macaroni and cheese: Macaroni and cheese is a newer menu item. In the 1990s, the younger generation in the family began having kids, and traditions shifted to become more family-friendly. Mac-and-cheese was added for this reason, and has stuck around ever since. This mac-and-cheese is made by scratch with one of Great Grandma’s recipes. This was a big step in Americanizing our holiday and represents our family adopting traditions. This is something Great Grandma did to allow the kids to enjoy the holiday and have a ‘traditional’ Christmas Eve celebration.
Christmas cookies: Christmas cookies have been a way for family members to spend time together since the beginning of the 1900s. Baking and decorating the dessert together brought the family together and made the end of the evening light hearted. This tradition has stuck around ever since. The recipe used is a traditional Italian sugar cookie recipe that has been passed down for generations. This is a way to keep traditions from our ancestors alive in our current celebrations while creating new traditions for where we live now.
Christmas ham: Ham has been served at the Massa Christmas Eve dinner since the 1940s. Nearing the end of the Great Depression, the family had a stable income again, and wanted to celebrate the holiday with a lavish meal. The Christmas ham represents prosperity in the family and the end of struggling. This is something that my Great Grandma always wanted to make for us for holidays because it represented wealth to her. Italian holiday traditions were set aside to have the ideal American Christmas Eve that represented wealth and security.
Sources:
Jack Santino. 1994. “Introduction,” “Holidays in America: Ritual, Festival, and Celebration,” and “Homemade Holidays: Making Symbols, Making Meaning.” All Around the Year, xiii-46. Urbana, IL: U. of Illinois Press.
Michael Owen Jones. 1988. “Afterword: Discovering the Symbolism of Food Customs and Events.” We Gather Together: Food and Festivals in American Life, Theodore and Lin C. Humphrey, eds., 235-245. Ann Arbor, MI: U. of Michigan Press.
Bernard L. Herman. 2019. Selections from A South You Never Ate. Chapel Hill, NC: U. of North Carolina Press.
