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However you celebrate Christmas, the chances are your traditional festive meal has an air of familiarity to it.

Four Christmas day foods from around the world

For many of us, it’s a roast turkey with all the trimmings, including those dreaded sprouts – or perhaps you and your family pull crackers alongside your annual nut roast.

But just as we have our traditions, around the world there are many variations to what we would think of as a Christmas dinner. ���˿��� Bitesize takes a look at some of the unique national festive dishes being served up each year.

Deck the Hallacas

In Venezuela, Christmas sees one of the country’s national dishes served up each year.

Families prepare hallacas, a traditional meal that dates from 15th and 16th-Century colonial times.

Enslaved people in the country prepared them originally by taking leftovers from meals that they had prepared and wrapping them in banana leaves to cook over fire.

In modern times, they’re made from corn dough, stuffed with a pork, beef or chicken stew, as well as raisins, capers, olives and other ingredients. They’re then wrapped in banana leaves before being boiled or steamed.

As making hallacas can be quite a lengthy process, it becomes a family Christmas tradition, with everyone working together to prepare them. Hallacas are also given out as gifts, with friends and neighbours exchanging their variations on the dish.

Rocking around the Christmas Sea Monster

Even though you might be stuffed from your Christmas lunch, there’s nothing like a festive dessert.

For many of us in the UK, that might be a mince pie or a piece of Christmas pudding. But in Portugal, it might be a lampreia de ovos, a particularly unique traditional sweet themed after a bloodsucking eel called the lamprey.

This not-so-festive sounding treat dates back to the 15th Century and is thought to have been created by nuns. In convents, they used egg whites to help keep their habits free of wrinkles, but found they had a surplus of yolks.

Combined with an influx of sugar to Portugal, the nuns made rich, yellow, sweet desserts that looked like very thin strings of pasta.

Effigies of lampreys were placed on top of the egg strands – the fish has been beloved in Portugal for centuries. Lamprey remains a popular choice to this day, particularly in areas close to the Rio Minho (Minho River) in the north of the country and Rio Tejo more centrally - while you will often see lampreia de ovos for sale in highly decorated boxes in Portuguese bakeries in the run up to Christmas.

Dreaming of a Doro Wat Christmas

In Ethiopia, Christmas isn't celebrated in December. The East African country's largest Christian denomination is the Orthodox church - meaning their festivities, known as Ganna, take place on 7 January each year.

The main meal eaten on Ganna is Doro Wat – the national dish of Ethiopia.

Doro Wat is a spicy chicken stew, typically served with injera – a type of fermented flatbread with a pancake-like texture.

The meal is often eaten from one communal bowl. It’s customary to wrap some of the fiery hot stew in the injera and then to put a piece directly in someone else’s mouth – feeding your friends and family in this way is a huge sign of love and respect in Ethiopia.

This practice is known as gursha – which means mouthful. It’s considered an honour and once someone has been given a gursha, it’s then their turn to return the favour.

Which country has a Kentucky Fried Christmas?

While turkey is a traditional main course for some Christmas meals, chicken is less common. Especially when it’s been deep fried.

But that’s exactly what happens in Japan each year where more than 3.5 million people head to KFC for a festive dinner.

It all started back in 1970, shortly after the first branch of the fast food chain opened in the country. The manager, Takeshi Okawara, was inspired by a dream one night to sell a party barrel of chicken on Christmas Day.

He said the idea must have come to him after overhearing some foreigners in his store talking about missing turkey and other traditional Christmas things while in Japan – only around 1% of people in Japan celebrate Christmas as it isn’t an official holiday in the country.

The restaurant’s head office loved the idea and took it national in 1974. To this day, many families in Japan mark Christmas Day with a party barrel or a premium whole chicken. Customers are encouraged to order their meals weeks in advance, with many of the stores seeing huge queues on Christmas Day itself.

This article was published in December 2021.