Hello, I'm Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palluses.

You're listening to our podcast that explores the history and stories of our six palaces.

These talks are a collection of some of our best live events.

I really hope you enjoy listening.

Tis the season to be jolly, so we've dipped into our stocking full of podcasts and pulled out

three festive talks that explore Christmas traditions through the ages.

I'm really glad to see so many of you.

Hopefully you're all full of the festive cheer.

Okay, it's a bit early for the festive cheer, but, you know, hey.

What we're doing tonight is a whistle stop tour, a romp, if you will,

through about 800 years of culinary history.

So, as you can imagine, we're not delving too deeply into most issues,

but you will come out with an idea of where your Christmas dinner comes from and hopefully a few ideas of

your own for, I don't know, pimping your own Christmas dinner, as it were, to create the

vernacular. What we're going to do is talk a little bit about Christmas in each period and then

dinner. Dinner is obviously where I kind of get off because that's what I do. I'm a food

historian first and foremost. But I think with anything, it's important

to put dinner in context. So we have to look at Christmas in order to understand Christmas dinner.

Christmas goes way, way back. Most of you probably know that it's associated with Saturnalia,

with pagan festivals in the middle of winter. The simple practical reason is that it's really

depressing winter. I mean, can you imagine if we had

nothing between the beginning of November and the beginning of March? Nothing to look forward to.

...