Every family has Christmas traditions- for some it might be attending Midnight Mass together, for others it might be visiting relatives on Christmas Eve or even decorating the Christmas tree as a family. In my house however one of our Christmas traditions is a little less traditional. Every single year without out fail we endlessly mock my mother’s attempt at stuffing. No matter how hard she has tried, no matter how many versions she makes, we criticize that current years attempt and offer out own advice even though we all know that we could do little better. Stuffing is one of those foods that all my family enjoys and because we only get it at Christmas we have extremely high expectations. My mum has strived in vain for perfection for as long as I can remember – as early as June she will announce that she’s found a new recipe she’s going to try (although that announcement is usually followed swiftly by a response along the lines of ‘but you’ll make two versions in case the new one doesn’t work out, right?’) and she’s even gone as far as using spices she buys from America. But never once in 18 years has she got it perfectly right probably due to my brothers wish that the onions be chopped so finely that he cant even see them, but she keeps trying every years aware in our house a bad stuffing can all but ruin Christmas. Over the years I have even tried to step in and ease the burden by meticulously chopping and dicing and watching the stuffing intently while it’s cooking to insure it didn’t lose its doughy texture or even worse burn. Although its always done in good humor sometimes our well intended advice of ‘You should have chopped the onions finer’ and “it needs to be crispy on the outside but still doughy on the inside’ gets occasionally misinterpreted and my dad has to act a as mediator. This year however the competition was taken to a whole new level. Normally on Christmas Day it is just my family but as most of Belfast was without water for nearly a week over Christmas, we had both of my mum’s brothers and sisters round for Christmas Day too. This meant not only double the amount of people but that my mum had to now compete with my Auntie Siobhan for our culinary affections over stuffing. Given my Auntie’s love of butter and my insistence that you can never have too much of it, it was never much of a competition. Although it wasn’t perfect it was just cooked enough on the outside and she had managed to find the ideal breadcrumb to onion ratio. My brother and sisters and I took up this opportunity to add insult to injury and persistently ask our mum why she couldn’t be as good a cook as her sister and tell her that if she didn’t take lessons we were going to move families. In response my mother suggested and that she was going to give up and that she would just use store bought from now on, a idea that was quickly shot down, perhaps proof that no matter how good it is improvements will always be suggested- after all tradition is tradition!