Holiday Meals and Memories

In our family, we spend more time and effort planning our holiday food than any other aspect of the season. Not only do we love to eat, but we also carefully curate our sense of home and family by sharing food. And during our holiday meals, we will be serving memories with a side of nostalgia.

Food is memory

Are there particular foods that you simply must have during the holidays? A main course or side dish that needs to be served? Are there some treats, cookies, and sweets that everyone looks forward to?

Over the years, our family has developed a set of food traditions. These traditions combine the foods that both my wife and I loved when we were young. We’ve also created some of our own holiday traditions by finding new things to eat and enjoy during the holiday season. Most families have these traditions. And mixing things up can be risky. For example, I don’t dare change my aunt’s sweet potato casserole. And someone must create the exact right version of the chocolate mousse.

When we break bread together, we remember together. We remember the times when we’ve had these foods before. We remember the perfect meals and laugh about the occasional kitchen failures.

A taste can evoke nostalgia

Frequently, smells and tastes evoke particular memories and bring to mind periods of time – a sense of nostalgia. Many different aspects of a current experience can bring memories to mind. As I have noted before, music is effective at bringing memories to mind. Visiting an old home can also lead to memories emerging into awareness.

But smells and tastes are particularly powerful. Proust noted this in his famous work “Remembrance of Things Past” as he wrote about how the taste of a Petite Madeleine dipped in tea reminded him of a time he spent with his aunt when he was a child. Current psychological research also documents that odors are very effective cues for memory (Herz, 1997).

The binding of cues with memories

Why are smells and tastes so effective? It has to do with how we build our memories.

Events have multiple components – smells and tastes, sounds and senses, locations and visual experiences. When we experience an event, we bind these distinct components together, creating a memory. When one sensory aspect is re-experienced, it may remind us of the entire experience (Johnson and Chalfonte, 1994). Memories are more likely to come to mind if a smell, taste, or other detail is uniquely attached to a particular memory or time period (Berntsen, Staugaard, and Sorenson, 2013). The holidays are perfect for creating such amazing retrieval cues.

The unique aspect of holiday foods is why they are such powerful cues for memories and nostalgia. Many of these are foods that we only have at the holidays. If we ate them throughout the year, they wouldn’t evoke memories. But these smells and tastes only happen now, during this particular time of the year. They call back memories of Christmas past. They hint at the wonder of childhood, the joy of being with family, and sometimes the nostalgia for a time that is lost forever.

Meals and memories

This year, we will have our traditional foods. And we will remember. Happy holiday meals and memories to you and your families.