Opinion: These Christmas foods are absolute garbage

You can pass the stuffing. But I’ll pass on the rest of these items at this year’s Christmas dinner.

There are a whole host of foods that we in the north like to throw onto our holiday plates that are genuinely archaic.

We’ve progressed as a species I think… so why hasn’t our holiday menu?

Enter: Man Repeller. This corner of the internet often gets me thinking about the important questions. This time, it’s the seasonally-appropriate acknowledgement that turkey just might suck.

Thrown from my comfortable compliance into the realization that tradition doesn’t mean perfection, I’m sitting here poking holes (with a fork, naturally) in other aspects of our holiday meals, too.

Let’s begin at the end.

They say: “life’s short, so we should eat dessert first.”

I say: “life’s short, so why would anyone eat fruitcake?”

Why fruitcake is rotten

Fruit, butter, sugar, and rum: all excellent consumables. But this dessert is a prime example of a food item that is significantly less than the sum of its parts.

Dense and disgusting, this — *shudder* — moist cake comes from a time when people were hankering for something sweet, and indulgent, but there simply wasn’t a whole lot to work with. Today, accessible and significantly-more-pleasant options include pumpkin pie, apple crumble, a chocolate chip cookie, or spooning Nutella from the jar.

You can’t convince me that there’s any reason to waste precious stomach space on something as unspectacular as fruitcake. Make like the Manitou Springs people and chuck it.

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Shut your mincemeat pie-hole

Take fruitcake, crumble it up in your hands, dip it in something sticky, then plop it into a pie shell and call it mincemeat. That’s the exact science behind how mincemeat pie is made.

Right?

Probably not, but I digress.

Even the name is a turn-off. Mincemeat? Historically, mincemeat pie actually did have little tiny pieces of meat in it, but that’s not really a thing these days. Since that’s the case, can’t we update the name to give the sad, strange little pie a little bit more sex appeal?

How about fibrous pie, or squished bug tart?

Because it looks like squished bugs.

Jello? More like hell no

Look at it. Look. At. It.

Do I even need to say anything? I don’t, but I will.

While high-waisted flares and the drive to “make love, not war,” are back in full-force, this dish, straight outta the 70s, should not be welcome on our modern-day tables. It can stay where it belongs, read: more than 30 years in the past.

Or on Dwight’s desk, with his stapler safely encased inside.

Either one is much better than Aunt Sue trying to shovel even a morsel onto my plate.

Eggnog isn’t all that

What people think eggnog is going to taste like:

What it actually tastes like:

Right up there with boiled pierogis vs pan-fried, this one’s all about the texture.

Delicious smell aside, the mucous-like consistency of eggnog calls for the body to immediately reject it. The way it slides down your throat is reminiscent of a flu-ridden, congested and booger-ey nose draining itself back into your body.

So, the exact opposite of how we want to feel during the holidays. Or ever? (Mmm, snot.)

But — and I’m not even plant-based — the vegan versions of this stuff can be great. I’m a big fan of the Holiday Nog by So Delicious. Warmed up, spiked, you have all the flavour and none of the weird textural experience.

Hot tip: It’s also great for making French toast.

Ham is sometimes not delicious

The aforementioned Man Repeller piece asks, “Have people eaten chicken before? HAM?” as an alternative to the decidedly-unappealing turkey.

To that, I say: “RT on the chicken. And how about duck?” But ham… ham is strange.

The user-experience is hit or miss. If the ham is juicy, thinly-sliced, and sweetly-glazed, it can be an indulgent delight.

But oftentimes, the stuff is rubbery and offers a mouth-feel that’s uncomfortably processed. And the flavour? In the latter, it’s spectacularly unspectacular.

My plate only has X amount of space on it, and ham is a decently-sized slab taking up Y amount of room. Given the chance, I’ll swap the surface area of Y out with some juicy duck and my jolliness-levels will increase significantly.

The greater good: obligatory stuffing shout-out

This is a dish that should be disgusting. The combination of bread that’s going stale, onions, celery, sausage, and apples all mixed together and stuffed into a bird carcass doesn’t sound appealing at all.

But as soon as it hits the table, I want first dibs.

I will load my plate with stuffing three times over, no shame. The soft and savoury mixture is so perfectly seasoned that I daydream about it in the middle of summer. It’s so lovely that it can even be included in leftover-sandwiches, alongside cranberry sauce, potatoes, and green bean casserole.

You can keep your rubbery ham sandwich and jello dessert, sicko.

I’ll stick with my leftover chunks of bread and onions, stuffed inside other, bigger bread.