Which Christmas Food are You?

If you thought finding a good turkey was difficult, you should spend Christmas in Slovakia, where carp is central to holiday cooking. Families will often keep one live in the bathtub until it’s time to make kapustnica, a thick sauerkraut soup.

Also called fried worms, though mopane is actually moth caterpillars, the dish is an important source of protein for parts of Africa. Most of the harvest is dried and preserved for months, but a fresh batch is always fried up for the holiday season. Some consider it a delicacy, while others see it as bushmeat.

Suckling pig is common for Christmas in Latin America, but in Norway they don’t even bother with the body. Roasted lamb’s head (or sheep’s) was once a poor man’s dish, but today it is considered a delicacy.

These might be the least pleasant dishes on this list. Mattak is the skin of a bowhead whale, beluga or narwhal, diced and served raw. If that’s not strange enough, kiviak is a hollowed-out seal skin stuffed with a few hundred seabirds called auks, feathers and bones and all. The body is then sown up and fermented for seven months before serving the birds straight from the seal.

Christianity isn’t big in Japan, but thanks to a marketing campaign from a while ago, the Japanese love to get fried chicken on Christmas, often reserving tables at KFC months in advance.