Italian Christmas Eve

The Feast of the Seven Fishes is part of the Italian-American Christmas Eve celebration, in Italy, it's not called a feast but it certainly is pretty much the same and they refer to this name as a "Grand Meal" for their Christmas celebration dinner.

Christmas Eve is a fasting day for any kind of meat, and only seafood is served (actually several kinds of fish is made on this day) as part of the menu.

This Italian Christmas Eve Tradition of no meat continues to stay true to an Italian American seafood feast we serve her in America.

The seafood is part of Catholic abstinence from eating meat until the feast of Christmas Day.

The "Grand Meal" (feast) consists of seven different seafood dishes and traditionally was started in Southern Italy, and known simply as The Vigil (La Vigilia).

This celebration was to wait and welcome the Vigilia di Natale, and the birth of baby Jesus.

The seafood for Roman Catholics typically is fried fish in oil and shellfish that they could afford and was freshly caught.

Among the fish were clams with pasta which we add to Cioppino which is a fish stew, a salted codfish called baccala being the most popular to serve which is a codfish in a tomato sauce or squid, white fish, and several others that were fried.

In some of the oldest Italian American families, there was no count of the number of fish dishes that were served this Christmas Eve night.

Fried smelts and other types of seafood like Calamari fried were introduced into the menu much later through the years on Christmas Eve.

Here is a sample of the most popular ones we make every year.

May you all have a blessed season upon and enjoy the Traditional we set forward to carry on with this Catholic Christmas Eve menu we made through the years.

Feast of 7 Fishes

Feast of 7 Fishes is a  Traditional Italian Christmas Eve serving 7 Fishes and as long as I could remember as a child I helped clean the octopus and learned how to make baccala along with more than even 6 more.

This is a long story of my childhood and memories made celebrating the birth of Christ and the meaning behind all Italian traditions.

As the years went by, Grandma, Grandpa, my mom, and dad continued to instill their traditions from their Regions in Italy brought to America with their teachings.

Now as an adult and they have long passed on, I continue to do the feast of 7 fishes to celebrate the birthday of the lord, midnight mass, and food traditions.

The memories that were made are priceless, and although the food continues to evolve from generation to generation in taste, quality, and presentation, we still always stick to those yearly Christmas Eve special foods.

Our Italian family will always remember the reason for the season first and are very thankful no matter what our table has on it year after year we are grateful we have each other.

Although born in America and raised in Utica, New York, (also referred to as "Little Italy") our values were instilled by our parents and grandparents and several of us still carry on traditions from one generation to another.