Ah yes, Yule traditions. I'm facing a Scandinavian Christmas, so can list the culinary good bad and uglies for comparison:

The good

Roast duck with 'brun kartoffler' (potatoes roasted in caramelised sugar) and red wine gravy

Ris a l'almond (rice pudding with chopped almonds, served with sherry or port. one or two whole almonds are placed in the bowl of one of the guests, and those guests win a special gift. amazingly, it is usually the children who win! go figure!)

Australian Barossa Valley Shiraz (Syrah)

The bad

Blood sausage, fried in thick slices and drowned in golden syrup

Pickled herring, ten different varieties marinated in different types of vinegar or unidentifiable mayonnaise or mustard like gunk and served cold on black bread. The smell alone can kill a grown moose at 50 yards.

The really really really ugly

Sun Eggs. Take a dozen eggs, and hard boil them for 20 minutes to a half hour. Put them in a clay pot filled with liquid salt. Bury them in the ground before it freezes, about a month before Christmas. On Christmas morning, send the men out with pickaxes and shovels to dig up the eggs.

The sun egg is eaten with lunch on Christmas day. It comes out of the salt solution perfectly grey. The shell is grey. The white of the egg is grey. The yolk however, is green. And it has gone from hard boiled to being runny, and green. The egg is carefully cut in two so that the green, runny yolk does not fall out (I think that is because it might eat through the plates and table top like the acid from Aliens). The victim then spoons a big spoonful of French mustard onto the egg, and takes a big glass of herb schnapps in the other hand. They then throw the egg down their gullet and drown it with the schnapps.

It is compulsory after this to say, "DEN var en god aeg!" (THAT was a good egg!)

I am the only person I know who can actually lose weight over Christmas.