this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2024
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okmatewanker
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Are you lot actually eating Christmas Dinner at lunch time? Do you start cooking at 6am? Are my family weird for not having it ready by 17:00 at the earliest?
Yes. I was scoffing at 3 which was running late.
Isn’t dinner just the cooked/largest meal of the day, regardless of when it occurs, and tea comes from afternoon tea and high tea?
And lunch happens in the middle of the day, otherwise we wouldn’t have brunch.
Apparently, dinner originally meant breakfast from the Old French "disner", meaning to break the fast, essentially de-fast.
Supper is from the Old French "soper" which just means soup-er
What a world.
Oh yeah, I’d forgotten about the French, and it’s been a long time since my GCSE French lessons but wasn’t petit-déjeuner breakfast? Is that a more modern invention?
Yep, dinner is the big hot one, lunch/tea is the small (sometimes) cold one
lunch/tea
Tea is something that you drink, not eat.
You've clearly never heard of iced tea.
Is he related to Mr T?
My mom continues to insist that something called "supper" exists, which replaces dinner.
No, supper is a light, late evening meal.
It can be either a replacement for dinner, or a later evening snack.
Don’t forget linner and dunch
Minnesotan here. Dinner is the evening meal to us, with supper being an old, outdated term for dinner.
When we say we're having Christmas dinner, we literally mean the evening meal. We're too busy opening presents and hanging out with family to have a big lunch; we usually just snack through lunch. Maybe put out a meat-and-cheese plate for everyone, maybe make some sandwiches.
In the evening, that's when we prepare a feast for everyone. That way, we've had a whole day to mingle and enjoy company and we're not immediately jumping into preparations for a giant meal.
My wife is from Nebraska though, and she calls the midday meal dinner. She's been having trouble adjusting to Minnesotan customs.
Former Minnesotan here. Growing up, dinner was the large meal, supper was the evening meal if the large meal had already been eaten.
A common example would be a Sunday pot-luck dinner after the church service, and a little supper around 6 that evening.
This threw me for a loop for a second. In the southern US a lot of the older folks call it breakfast, dinner, and supper.
And they get worked up about it too
"Yer eatin dinner? It was dinnertime 6 hours ago!"
The south is a strange place....
In Sweden theres "Kvällsmat" or "Evening food" and some also call it "Middag" or "Mid day". "Middag" in this case is ate at the evening and not the middle of the day. Then we use the same word for eating a meal during the day, "Lunch".
My cousins family refer to the midday meal as "Dinner" instead of lunch, and they refer to the evening meal as "Tea"
Bizzare world
Jokes on them; we have Christmas Elevenses.
Can someone explain the debate to a continental?
I used to live in Ireland and we'd have breakfast, then lunch halfway through school/work, dinner upon getting home from school/work, and tea some time in the evening.
Yeah, in the south (actually mostly in the “Home Counties” kind is south, not really anything to do with the south west or anything, just the posh London chumps and Essex wankers) you have breakfast, lunch, and supper, and up north you have some combination of breakfast, dinner, and tea. They’re both wrong, for reasons I, as a Cornishman, won’t go into
In the southern US, they refer to the midday meal as dinner and the evening meal as supper.
In the rest of the US, the midday meal is lunch and the evening meal is dinner.
OP is saying that, since it's called Christmas Dinner and not Christmas Lunch, it must follow Southern tradition.
However, as a US Northerner, we've always had Christmas Dinner in the evening. So OP is celebrating differently than we do in the north.
But that's just the US debate. OP included "Tea" as the evening meal, which isn't something we do here in the US, so I suspect they're talking about a UK debate.
This goes way back, in France it is small breakfast (petit dejeuner), breakfast (dejeuner) is at midday, dinner whenever in the evening, and there's no lunch. All because how late lazy nobility used to get out of bed.
Protip: dinner comes from Latin "desiunare", which also means breakfast.
Déjeuner, dîner, souper in French
A pretty big % of English is just French or inspired by it
Therefore breakfast (which is déjeuner translated, could be "unfasting" if we went more literal), dinner and supper are correct