Greek Christmas Recipes: A Complete Festive Menu

Christmas in Greece starts long before 25 December. Many families keep the 40-day Advent fast from 15 November, so the Christmas table that ends it is a real feast: a warming soup, slow-cooked pork or a stuffed turkey, a decorated Christmas bread and trays of honey and butter cookies that have been baking for weeks.

Here is a complete Greek Christmas menu with our recipes, from soup to sweets, plus a plan for what to make when, so you can cook a Greek Christmas dinner at home.

Soup and starters

• Avgolemono soup: egg and lemon soup, the light start many Greeks eat to break the fast after church on Christmas morning.
• Laxanodolmades: cabbage rolls with minced meat and rice in egg-lemon sauce, a Christmas favourite in northern Greece.
• Spanakopita: spinach and feta pie to put on the table while everyone arrives.

Main course

• Hirino me selino: pork with celery in egg-lemon sauce, the classic Greek Christmas main.
• Greek stuffed turkey: filled with minced meat, rice, chestnuts and pine nuts.
• Baked lamb with potatoes: for families who prefer lamb on the festive table.

Christmas bread and New Year’s cake

• Christopsomo: the decorated Christmas bread, baked on Christmas Eve.
• Vasilopita: the New Year’s cake with the lucky coin, cut on 1 January.

Christmas sweets

• Melomakarona: honey and walnut cookies, the taste of a Greek Christmas.
• Kourabiedes: butter and almond cookies under a thick layer of icing sugar.
• Diples: paper-thin fried pastries with honey syrup and walnuts.
• Karydopita: walnut cake soaked in spiced syrup.
• Baklava: layers of filo, walnuts and honey.

Plan ahead

• Three weeks before: kourabiedes and melomakarona, which keep for weeks in a tin.
• A few days before: diples without their syrup, and the karydopita, which is better the next day.
• 24 December: bake the christopsomo and make the turkey stuffing and keep it in the fridge (stuff the bird only on the day).
• 25 December: roast the turkey or cook the pork with celery, and finish the avgolemono just before serving.
• 31 December: bake the vasilopita for New Year’s Day.

Greek Christmas ingredients from Bakaliko

• Melodiko - Thyme Honey 400 g
• Thalassa Spices - Ground Mahlepi 5 g
• Elma - Chios Mastic Fine Crystals 10 g
• Thalassa Spices - Ceylon Cinnamon, ground 40 g
• Kagia - Whole Cloves 10 g
• Kandylas - Petimezi (Grape Syrup) 370 g
• Kagia - Pine Nuts 10 g
• Foufas - Liofyto Extra Virgin Olive Oil 500 ml
• Ioakimidis - Kourabiedes with Whole Almonds 470 g (ready-made)

Photo: Alpha, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.