Festive Foods Friday 5

Another Friday 5 meme from RevGalBlogPals.

Today's Festive Foods features a tamely serious selection of questions and answers.

1. Favorite cookie/candy/baked good without which, it's just not Christmas.

In general I'm not into sweets, though I do enjoy pie (sometimes I tell people I like my fruit inside a crust with ice cream on top); having said that, Richard's mince pie comes closest—he trained as a pastry chef in Germany and his crust is even better than my Midwestern grandmother's!

2. Do you do a fancy dinner on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, both, or neither? (Optional: with whom will you gather around the table this year?)

These days, neither—I'm not formally serving a church and I don't have family in town, so for the past few years I've celebrated Christmas in Tucson, where we'll be having traditional turkey, etc. I'm anticipating a dozen or more of us will gather around the table.

3. Evaluate one or more of the holiday beverage trifecta: hot chocolate, wassail, egg nog.

1. Hot Chocolate: I've sworn off both HC (not Holy Communion, though) and its analog, Hot Cocoa, due to memories of waking up the morning after the evening before with a migraine.
2. Wassail: to my knowledge I've never had it.
3. Eggnog: Yes, yes, amen! Ideally the real thing, homemade, but with only vanilla flavoring—no rum and no rum flavoring, either.
4. Glögg or Glugg: great memories! I discovered it when I was musician for a Lutheran congregation of Swedish origins. The senior pastor gave everyone on staff bottles of glögg plus a portion of the fruits that'd been soaked in the spirits.

4. Candy canes: do you like all the new-fangled flavors or are you a peppermint purist?

Not so much into eating the candy canes as into using them to decorate, so any flavor or color works for me, though you need to have at least a few traditional red-and-white striped.

5. Have you ever actually had figgy pudding? And is it really so good that people will refuse to leave until they are served it?

Yes, many times I've had it served with hard sauce, which I don't like, but I love FP with lemon sauce, which I'm willing to make myself.

Is it really all that wonderful?

I've never experienced anyone refusing to leave before being served FP, but don't most legends develop out of fact?

Edited to add: Well, I am APPALLED with myself that I forgot to include a question about the crown prince of holiday foods—the fruitcake. Feel free to add your thoughts on this most polarizing holiday confection.

It's been years since I've had any fruitcake, but I do like the kind that's mostly cake batter - either light or dark - with just a few fruits. I detest the kind loaded with fruit.

An additional note from moi: since I wasn't on board for the Advent Friday Five, I'm planning to answer it anyway at some point (maybe not until after Christmas) in order to make a quadrivium.