“A mountain of food”. This is probably the best way to describe with a sentence the Italian Christmas time.

Christmas is Italy MUST be spent with the family. No matter how far away you live from them, no matter the odyssey of flights, trains, buses, hitchiking you have to go through in order to get back to your home.

Many families have a smaller celebration dinner the night of the 24th but the main “event” remains always the pantagruelic lunch of the 25th December. My family has a number of peculiar features that recurs every year.

– the global Christmas morning “fever”: an almost medical term to describe a condition of the individuals of the Bergamaschi family, where shouting and stressed excitement  build up from 9 and climax at noon.

– the late arrival of my mother’s sister family: meant to arrive at 12.30 the latest, they always pop up not earlier than 13.15.

– the distribution of “nonna’s envelopes”: the magnanimity of my grandma traditionally reaches a peak during Christmas. Each of the grandnephew receives an money-envelope which is placed on the lunchtable, under the corresponding plates. Epic fights for obtaining the seat with the most crooked plate (meaning the amount of money in the envelope is higher!)

– the “apocalyptic lunch”. Basically eating until people start to collapse on the sofa.

– the traditional watching of cam recordings from the 90’s: me and my cousins when we were little, the eyebrow-raising “holiday trips” of my uncle and so forth.

Buon Natale, Italian style!