What do you mean? The 2 weeks surrounding Christmas are just cooking and eating. Meeting people to cook together, meeting people to eat together. Visiting distant parts of the family you only see once a year and eating together. Visiting friends you only see once a year and eating together. I mean, chocolate is good; but there's way too many dishes you want to eat that you likely don't have enough vacation days to prepare them all. Then it becomes a point of optimization and huge discussions regarding what to prepare for lunch and dinner, attempting to make it so that none of the 15 people at dinner had already had that dish in those days or were planning to have it on another day. This is clearly impossible and that is where the real importance and respect of a person amongst the group of people he's meeting becomes evident as he will muster support towards the dishes he was proposing by parts of the other people.
Well, I'm cooking dinner tonight for a few people; respect is very high: in fact yesterday I just said I'd cook something and nobody actually asked what I'd cook. I don't know yet what to cook. A couple days ago with one of the people in there I made risotto, I'd rather not repeat. I guess we could go for a pasta to keep it moderately simple as they work tomorrow morning and we don't have much time, but I'll accept suggestions.