Since we moved to an artificial Christmas tree, it seems sort of ridiculous to take new photos of it ... but I suppose that the annual decorations vary 😉 I still, well, pine for our old cut trees, and my family’s balled trees we’d plant outside.

Christmas Dinner 2025: My wife prepared a really nice 4.8 kg (10.6 lb) goose. Brining it clearly makes a difference. Side dishes were Brussels sprouts and potato dumplings.

I realized something recently:

Christmas goose is very traditional in German-speaking regions (Germany, Alsace, Austria) and amongst the Pennsylvania Dutch. Goose was associated with winter feasts long before turkey was common or affordable. It fell out of favor in the U.S. because it’s expensive and slow to raise, requiring specialized cooking and fat-rendering skills, and doesn’t scale well for modern supermarkets. After WWII, American tastes shifted toward leaner, easier-to-prepare meats such as turkey (and even ham), while industrial marketing promoted those options. Goose survived mainly in pockets of German-American communities, like Pennsylvania Dutch Country, where traditional knowledge and small-farm practices persisted.

A Christmas goose isn’t just a roast; it’s a fat-management project: One 1) pricks the skin repeatedly, 2) renders and saves quarts of fat, and 3) uses that fat later for potatoes, breads, and frying. Once people stopped cooking daily with animal fats and shifted to butter, margarine, and later vegetable oils, goose became “greasy” rather than valuable.

I'm not a wine drinker, but my son brought some Hutter Weissburgunder back from the location of his recent hunting trip to Austria, and it's excellent hutter-wein.at .

Soundtrack was open.spotify.com/playli… .