Our favorite season, Christmas is here again with its many beautiful traditions that leave us amazed a wide-eyed. It’s time to get back to our Christmas trees, Christmas lights, and, most importantly, we get together with our friends and families.
Many Christmas traditions often come naturally to us that we don’t even bother to think of their origins and their significance. We just go on with them year after year.
Now it’s time we are reminded of one Christmas tradition we might have never bothered about how it all started; eating turkey at Christmas.
Like sending of Christmas cards, eating of turkey has to be a tradition we carry out every beautiful Christmas season without missing a beat.
Origin of the tradition
In Britain, the tradition began in 1526, what many people eat at Christmas before this time were geese, peacocks and boars’ head.
One of the many reasons Turkeys were later eaten at Christmas was because farmers needed both their chickens and cows for their eggs and milk, respectively. In those days, both of these essential products were expensive. So there needed to be an alternative to the farmers losing the precious producers of their products. There came the Turkey, which was more convenient, as they could still keep hold of their livestock for milk and egg production.
The first recorded person to eat a Turkey on Christmas day was King Henry VII, although the tradition wasn’t popular up until the 1950s when it overtook goose as the preferred choice of Christmas meal.
One of the most useful things about this tradition in modern-day Christmas is that the season is a great time to spend with the family and fortunately the turkey is a perfect sized meal for the whole family.
According to many people today, Christmas wouldn’t be the same without Turkey, so this is a tradition that has come to stay for a long time.