Christmas Around the World

I'm one of the room moms for Eli's second-grade class. He has an excellent, kind teacher. She keeps the kids engaged with academics, but really makes it fun along the way. For their Christmas party, rather than do the traditional cupcake and candy cane party, she wanted the kids to learn something, too. She had them work on researching 8 different countries' holiday traditions, and for the party we had food from those countries for them to try. Not all foods were authentic, but I think we had a pretty good spread:

• South Africa/Ghana: Chicken Nuggets (they traditionally have chicken at Christmas)
• Israel: Latkes (these are potato-cakes that I learned to make just for this. They were a hit!). We served them-according to tradition-with sour cream, applesauce, or fruit preserves.
  
• Russia: Star-shaped biscuits
• England: "Plum Pudding" (in quotes because we served Yoplait's prune yogurt.)
• France: Yule Logs (Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls)
• Switzerland: Swiss Panetone Cake (available, truly imported from Switzerland, at Sam's Club)
• Austrailia: Ice cream (it's summertime there in Dec.)
• Mexico: Mexican Wedding Cookies ( We had neighbors from Mexico in AZ who brought us some of these at Christmas, so I know these are truly a traditional treat!)

The kids also got to decorate gingerbread houses, and we were able to use our budget to get each child a beanie with "Huskies"(the school system mascot) embroidered on it. We made a photobook for the teacher with pictures of the class and little notes written by the students to the teacher as the text for the book. It was so fun to see the kids so excited for their teacher to see the gift they had a part in making!
This party was DEFINITELY more work than a typical grade-school Christmas party, but having an excited child come up to me to say " I researched that country! That's what they eat at Christmas," made it really worthwhile.