I have often been asked what its like in Belgium at Christmas time and the truth be told after 8 years I am still non the wiser. They do celebrate on the 5/6th December with Sinterklaas which is something I have never been around for, but then it is for the kids really.
The real Christmas for us starts with the ordering of the food. My wife and I plan the menu, although she leads of course. I am consulted only to make me feel like I have been involved in the decision making process, a bit like choosing furniture or how the living room should look... In a way it is quite fair as she does the vast majority of the preparation of the food, I am basically a skivvy that moves things around and runs errands. It is a busy time, what with all of the social events as well as organising our own party. The family come down from Antwerp, the UK and round the corner too, it is a great day of fun, eating, drinking and generally being merry with the occasional stressful moments thrown in, nothing unusual there then!
The food we have is a kind of hybrid of UK and Belgian, so much so that, apart from the obvious differences, it is sometimes hard to explain. I suppose the first time we had our party was the most stark, there were that many side dishes that we practically ran out of space. It was interesting watching the Belgian side of the family sticking to their familiar dishes and the UK side sticking to theirs, so much for integration! As an example the Belgian tradition includes warm pear halves with freshly made cranberry sauce, steamed chicory, boiled red cabbage with bay leaves, croquettes and green beans with bacon wrapped around. Some of the evil vegetables such as Brussels sprouts are common to both. But things such as pigs in blankets, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, sage stuffing and Yorkshire puddings are a definite UK contribution. I, lacking in style and taste, prefer cranberry sauce from a jar than the rather rich home made stuff that my wife makes. What made my day one Christmas was that my youngest niece choose the jar over the home made stuff.
For the meat we have had, turkey, duck and pheasant. To the surprise of the wife my mother said the best way to cook the turkey was very slowly, overnight at low temperature. That way it stays moist and is a rather nice aroma to wake up to in the morning. Buying pork is a bit of a snag as the thought of having crackling is somewhat repulsive to most Belgians and when you think about it eating the fatty roasted skin of a pig you can understand why! There is a local butcher who knows what to do when you want a proper bit of roast pork with apple sauce.
The meal itself, for us at least, is spread over the whole day from around 13.00 onwards. There are nibbles, soup, main, Belgian Christmas cake, Christmas pudding, Brit Christmas cake, cheese with bread and crackers, coffee and sweets throughout. It is more like grazing and the alcohol begins with champagne and then diverges off into red wine, beer and other various soft drinks and shorts. I think I have mentioned the heart attack Christmas cake before, it is a different kind of heart attack to the heavy UK fruit cake with icing and marzipan. The Belgian version is lots of cream, sponge and bits of fruit too. Some dare to take the UK Christmas pudding, which is so heavy that it will send you off for a nap if you are not careful. Crackers (the edible kind) are a UK contribution to the cheese round. Normally for the Belgians you have bread, which includes nut, raisin and sugar bread. Crackers have taken off here as readily as the properly made cup of tea! One of my favourites is the nut bread, but by this stage I am struggling to find the room for it. I didn't mention it before but we have formed a tradition by which An makes chicken liver pate every year, it is divine.
Also introduced to the Belgian table were crackers (the pulling variety), party poppers and rocket balloons, oh the fun and mess of those. The cat is non too keen on these noisy party pieces though, he is normally in a self imposed exile in the garage from quite early on, even when tempted by the aroma of turkey.
So the run up is getting all of this together and it is becoming quite a well organised affair. We order our cheese from a delicatessen in Leuven and I pick it up on Christmas Eve on my rounds. The shop is near the fish market in Leuven, in which it is notoriously difficult to find a parking space. This year I made the fatal mistake of failing to choose between the car park at the station, where there would definitely have been a space and the fish market where there was unlikely to be a space. I opted for perhaps the most tight of all multi storey car parks in the world and took on the challenge of getting my car into it. The car park was designed to house smart cars and mine is about three times longer and twice as wide. The hardest part was that of getting through the barrier, where the company had helpfully placed an additional steel shaped edge, presumably to protect the wall and not the cars going in, the effect was to narrow the gap. It felt like navigating a supertanker in the Suez Canal but with a lot less space on either side of the car... I was happy to see that I had to go to level 4 before managing to find a space big enough to accommodate the car.
The trip usually includes a visit to the local butcher or whoever is supplying the meat and a trip to the supermarket to pick up the pre-ordered food. An normally pre-orders the food so that we just have to collect, the thought of jousting with fellow shoppers just doesn't appeal.
Sometime before then I do a run to the UK to pick up the essential Brit stuff, including boxes of Quality Street, crackers (both kinds), puddings, jam and a host of other things. A trip to the brewery and on Christmas day itself I am dispatched to the bakers to collect the cake and other baked goods.
In reality things are not a lot different between UK and Belgium, I suppose each family has its own special way of doing things.
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