Women, food, and families / Nickie Charles and Marion Kerr.
- Nickie Charles
- Date:
- [1988]
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Credit: Women, food, and families / Nickie Charles and Marion Kerr. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![28 Women, food and families because we both wanted to do it. But I always do now. He helps though and makes sauces.' Although women cooked, men might wash up. As one woman commented: 'That is a rule in our family, the ladies do the meal and the men wash up.' However, in most families it was women who cooked Christmas dinner and washed up. And although in a few cases men might argue over who was to cook Christmas dinner, no women reported argu¬ ments over who should prepare and cook the daily round of proper family meals. Christmas dinner was important as a means of uniting family members who did not normally come together to share food. It is because of this that it has a symbolic significance. It represents the coming together of the extended family and is a means of uniting and reinforcing bonds between family members who may not eat together at any other time of year. In fact, 116 (58%) of our families ate Christmas dinner as an extended family while 71 (35-5%) ate it as a nuclear family. The figure for those eating this meal as an extended family is therefore considerably higher than the number of families celebrating Christmas as a nuclear family. This points to an extremely significant ideological function of Christmas dinner which distinguishes it from a normal Sunday dinner, and that is that it brings together and, therefore, reinforces the extended family, while the Sunday dinner, together with the proper family meal, reinforces the nuclear family. For most of the women, then, Christmas is essentially an extended family occasion and this can mean that the logistics of the event become fairly complicated: Since we've got married we've never had a Christmas dinner at home. [Do you take it in turns where to go?] We usually do, yes. I think the first Christmas we had it at my mum's, the second Christmas at my husband's mother's and then we went back to my mum's the third Christmas and the fourth Christmas we had it at my sister's ... So it is difficult choosing where to go because I suppose each one of us wants to be with our family as well but we've just sort of come to an arrangement where we take it in turns ... In fact this year I said I wouldn't mind staying at home but I don't know, Christmas dinner for the three of us wouldn't seem the same. My husband comes from a big family - four brothers and four sisters - Christmas dinner there is always nice, there's always lots of people there, it's nice. At my mum's there's always plenty of people there -1 can't visualise it on our own.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18028706_0041.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
