Students Share Family-Favorite Foods for the Holidays
Brayden Scering
Winter is a time for many different foods and traditions, Christmas and Thanksgiving are just two holidays that have distinctive food linked with them. Manchester University students and faculty offer insight about the foods and traditions they enjoy with their family.
Assistant Professor of political science Michael Bednarczuk says that his favorite holiday tradition is his Thanksgiving with his in-laws. He and his family moved Thanksgiving to October to better align with everyone’s schedules to make sure everyone can make it. He says his young nephew named this new Thanksgiving the “Gala for Harvesting Festival Party Day” which they shortened to “GFHFPD (pronounced guffah-huffah-puddah).
Manchester University has students from across the nation, and one of those students Jason Harris is from Atlanta, Georgia. Harris and his family enjoy many different foods for Thanksgiving. He says they like to cook mac and cheese, dressing, collard greens, ham, turkey, and black-eyed peas. His favorite Thanksgiving traditions are watching football with his family, playing board games, and listening to music. His favorite Christmas traditions are when his dad makes eggnog, and says they like to go to the movies on Christmas night.
Alyssa Vasquez represents the fellow Hoosiers from Manchester. She says her family makes traditional Thanksgiving dishes, such as turkey, ham, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and green beans. A Christmas dish she enjoys having with her family is a Mexican dish called mole. She says that her favorite traditions for Christmas are when she and her family all get new pajamas and wear them on Christmas Eve. Her Christmas day traditions are enjoying butter braids in the morning and letting her pets open their presents before her and her family do.
Garrett Lewis is from Monroe, Michigan. He and his family love to spend the holidays together and make the holidays all about family. He and his family have a yearly reunion on Christmas time and do a gift exchange with everyone and spend time together. Being from the Detroit area, he, and his family love to watch the Detroit Lions every year because they play on Thanksgiving. The usual holiday foods he enjoys are a turkey on Thanksgiving and a ham on Christmas. His family loves to have pies such as pumpkin pie and apple pie which are both thanksgiving staples. They enjoy stuffing and green bean casserole with their turkey.
A Miami, Florida, native, Josue Castro, runs through some of his favorite traditions and foods he enjoys during the holidays. He explains that his Hispanic heritage has a lot to do with what foods he and his family make for thanksgiving and one of these differences are they do not eat a turkey. They like to eat Hispanic foods such as Gallo Pinto, which is a dish made with white rice and refried beans. He says that they have mashed potatoes but do not have gravy. His families Christmas traditions and foods are that they open presents on Christmas Eve instead of Christmas day. The foods his family makes for Christmas are a full-sized pig, a Hispanic dish called Baho, which is roast beef mixed with yuca and plantains.