Okay, let's face it.  This is not the time of year to be counting calories.  With all of the holiday events, food is plentiful and easily accessible.  Rich meats, savory vegetables, cookies and cakes at every turn.  And don't forget the drinks.  Buttered-rum Toddies, mulled wine, eggnog, mintinis and Sugar Plum martinis - they're the perfect complement to all the delicious foodstuffs.  The holiday season is a time for indulgence.  And indulge we do, with Christmas eve supper, or Christmas dinner, being the culmination for many families.

But Christmas dinner hasn't always been so tasty, at least not by our standards. Prior to 1550, most food was game and vegetables that were heavily spiced, salted, pickled or otherwise preserved to try and keep it fresh longer.  Peacock and swan, complete with feathers, could be found on the holiday table of kings and queens.  A pie referred not to something sweet but rather to a food, usually meat and vegetables, baked within a scarcely edible crust.  In fact, up until about 1680, live birds, rabbits, frogs, turtles -  and occasionally beautiful women and dwarves, were baked in large pies and served at the table.  British nobles enjoyed the shock value of handing the carving knife to an unsuspecting guest and having them burst from the pie when it was cut open.

Although animals were domesticated, many families couldn't afford to keep them. Chicken was seen as a poor man's food, and although turkeys were raised in Britain in the 1600's, they were reserved for nobility.  In Germany, Christmas carp appeared on the table, and boar's head was the traditional celebratory meal for many families.   But boar grew out of fashion by the mid-1600 as it took a week to prepare and besides, they were hard to catch and the population grew smaller every year.  The French didn't really hit their culinary highpoint until the reign of King Louis XIV, who raised cooking to an art form with the employment of 50 chefs at Versailles.  Up until that point, the French ate whatever meat and fish was available, usually cooked on a spit.It wasn't until the mid-1800's that the French began the tradition of Le Réveillon, a long night of feasting on gastronomic delights.

Although geese were wild as well as domesticated in Europe and Britain, they too, were only for the rich.  Okay, now you're wondering about Tiny Tim. Dickens's popular character had no money, so how did they afford the goose?  They, like many families in Victorian times, belonged to a goose club, where working class Londoners made a weekly contribution towards a goose. Maybe that was really the start of modern day Christmas club accounts?

The Christmas feast has come a long way in just a few hundred years. Most of us now sit down to a dinner of pork, turkey, and the occasional Christmas goose.  But at the firefly, we like to make sure we can all go back to our roots.  So you will see game and other non-traditional items on our menu.  And definitely plenty of temtping sweets and pastries. But we promise no live birds or dwarves popping out of pies.  There are some places we just won't go.