A Greek Cypriot Christmas

Steph Green reminisces about growing up in a Greek Cypriot household and all the delicious flavours that accompanied her every Christmas

What’s Christmas like in your household?

“My dad and my uncles fight over who gets to eat the lamb brain,” says Toula, the main character in the 2002 film My Big Fat Greek Wedding. “And then my Aunt Voula forks the eyeball and chases me around with it, trying to make me eat it because it’ll make me smart. We’re always together, just eating, eating, eating.”

Perfectly summing up the sheer obsession with food found in Greek households, this film is often offered up as an example when Greek people are asked about their festive traditions. There are as many as 335,000 Greek Cypriots living in the UK today, with each bringing with them family traditions and recipes that remain in generations and Christmas traditions year after year —with many of these revolving around eating, eating, and yet more eating.

Despite this, Greek Cypriot baking in particular doesn’t hold as much widespread revere as other countries’ reputations like France or Italy. The best Cypriot bakers won’t have attended esteemed cookery schools or have perfected their techniques in formal training; sometimes recipes are haphazard, based on instinct, and vary from household to household. However, there’s one common thread: family tradition and lineage, with recipes being perfected through the sacred rite of hospitality and passed on from parent to child. Though Cypriot baking now no longer conjures up the image of peasant women kneading bread in whitewash-walled village houses, the smells of their creations still linger today in households across the United Kingdom. My mother, Theodosia, inherited this sense of above-and-beyond hospitality from my grandparents, who emigrated from Patriki, a tiny village in Cyprus (and the birthplace of George Michael), to London in the 1950s.