Christmas has once again come and gone… But we’re still eating the leftovers at our house! That’s because every Christmas Eve, my family has a traditional Scandinavian dinner, smorgasbord-style!

My grandparents on my father’s side are Scandinavian (Grandma is Swedish and Grandpa is Norwegian), so the traditions they had growing up carried over to our Christmas Eve table.

The star of the show is always the Swedish meatballs – wonderfully tender meatballs in a brown cream sauce loaded with dill. I have looked forward to these every year for as long as I can remember!

Next is the cold cut platter. I think this is the dish that baffles my husband the most. We really do just roll up cold cuts and put them on a plate. It’s more special than lunch meat because it’s rolled up, see? We serve it with roasted red peppers, black olives, and pickled herring, the most revolting food on the planet (I won’t touch the stuff).

Deviled eggs, though not specifically a Scandinavian dish, always make it to the table.

Sometime during my childhood, my father made the addition of stuffed shrimp – jumbo shrimp, butterflied and stuffed with lump crab meat.

Normally we have my grandmother’s potato salad, but this year we switched it up with some fantastic pasta salad.

For dessert, it’s cookies, cookies, and more cookies! Grandma always makes traditional Norwegian krumkake and sandkake cookies. Krumkake cookies are very thin waffle cookies that are rolled into a cone shape. They’re very fragile, lightly crisp, and one of the best cookies on the planet.

Sandkake cookies are shaped like a small tart and flavored with a little almond extract. They’re crisp, gently sweet, and fantastic. No Christmas would be complete without these cookies.

But that’s not all. Every year my mother makes her famous chocolate chip cookies (famous because she gets the recipe right from the chocolate chip package but somehow makes them taste better than any other chocolate chip cookie in the world).

I usually make a few different varieties of cookies, but since I’m quite promiscuous with my cooking, I tend to make different cookies every year. This year it was mocha sandwich cookies, chocolate-covered dulce de leche cookies, gingerbread bars, and fudge.

Some may find this Christmas Eve meal a little… odd. But it’s all I’ve ever known, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything!

Hope you all had a fantastic holiday! See you in 2010!