What Are Your Favorite Holiday Foods?

Ask anyone why they love the holiday season and one of their top three answers will always be, “the food.” From cookies and pastries to the traditional Italian Christmas Eve Feast of the Seven Fishes, few holidays generate quite so much culinary excitement.

While my family comes from a diverse ethnic background, including Greek, German and Dutch, our holiday focus has always been on my mother’s Slovak heritage, and Christmas morning is an open-house affair with homemade pierogies, sour soup, potato latkes, nut and poppy seed rolls. We carbo-load until we’re bloated, then settle down to watch “” until we’ve digested enough to make room for more. 

We'd love to know what your holiday food traditions are. Do you follow an ethnic menu? Is your table spread with the same dishes every year without fail, or do you try something new each time? And the cookies . . . ooooh, the cookies . . . what are your favorites? 

Let us know what your favorites are, and yes, if you're willing, share recipes! Just upload a photo and the details to this story or, leave a note in the comments.

Meanwhile, here’s a video of how to make homemade pierogies in five minutes that we put together for Easter. That’s right . . . they can be made from scratch in five minutes, even if you have a pig named Petunia helping out in the kitchen. For Christmas I spend about four hours rolling out hundreds of them while watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” over and over again . . . Don't limit yourself to potato filling! We also do sweet potato, sauteed cabbage, saurkraut, farmers' cheese, tofu and my personal favortie, prune lekvar. Yummmmm.

Bon Apetit!