Feast of the Seven Fishes

Giorgio Celmo

It has been my family tradition to celebrate Christmas Eve with a feast of the seven fishes, myself and my family always defamed from eating meat until after midnight mass. But we never went hungry, we had plenty of fish and vegetable dishes to eat and plenty of wine to go along.

I moved to San Diego and soon had a best friend in Frank from Brooklyn. We became fast friends and always planed Christmas Eve dinner for our family and friends. We would go downtown to little Italy and buy all the appetizers.

Such as olives, cheeses, calamata, stuffed mushrooms, Italian sardines in oil. Fresh baked rolls and lots of Italian Christmas cookies.

Plus we would make our own fish dishes and vegetable dishes to accommodate the rest of the feast. Here I will write some of my old fish dishes that we served in San Diego and family dishes. Below is an explanation of the feast.

Feast of the Seven Dishes

It is tradition that Italian-Americans have a seven-fish dinner on Christmas Eve. Some think that it is perhaps one fish representing each day of the week, but most traditions come from the observance of the La Vigilia Di Natale — the wait for the birth of Christ — in which early Catholics fasted on Christmas Eve until after receiving communion at Midnight Mass.

In later years it became a penitential day, meaning that all foods except meat were allowed. Other traditions are that three fish dishes would be served, representing the Three Wise Men or the Holy Trinity, while in some homes there may have been as many as 13, one for each of the apostles, plus one for Jesus. Each family and each sect of the Italian culture is different — the seven-fish version is from a Naples tradition. It also depends on what was available in various parts of Italy; in most of the southern coastal regions in Italy and Sicily, seafood was abundant, so other areas have nine fish, and still others 12 types (supposedly representing the 12 apostles).