Wondering about Christmas Dinner

Christmas Dinners in New Zealand

We read about the Lush family having Christmas dinner in 1851.
We wondered:
What do we eat at Christmas Time? Is it the same or different to what the Lush family had?

Christmas

Dinner

1851

Lush Family

2015

Class7 Children

Vegetables green peas
new potatoes
peas
broccoli
kumera
potatoes
salad; cucumber, lettuce,
tomatoes, carrots
asparagus
Meat ham
fowl (chicken?)
beef
turkey
chicken
sushi
sausages
we have tomato sauce
or gravy on our meat
Desert apple tart
custard
plum pudding
apple tart
custard
plum pudding
fruit salad with apples,
pears, grapes, pineapple,
banana strawberries with chocolate
icecream
chocolate pudding
chocolate mudcake
pavalova
trifle

We noticed:

  • We have some foods the same as the Lush family.
  • We have more food choices than the Lush family.
  • We have food that comes from lots of different places in the world.

We thought the differences might be because:

  • We have more markets and shops to buy our food in and the Lush family had to grow their own food. Mr Lush said they didn’t have strawberries but they were going to grow some for next year. Some of us like growing strawberries too but we can also buy them at the supermarket so we can always choose to eat strawberries for Christmas if we want to.
  • We have more ways of storing food like a fridge, freezer, and tins. This means we can have some foods when they are not growing in our garden.
  • There are lots of different ways of traveling now like flying that is faster than the big ships the Lush family would have had so food can come from other places quickly and it is still good to eat when it gets here.
  • Because it is easy to travel, we know about food from different countries. We can go places to try new food and we can learn how to make it.
  • We have the internet so we can see pictures of food, use an internet cookbook and watch videos on Youtube to find out how to make different kinds of foods.