Why Do We Eat Ham at Christmas and Easter?

Easter: a ham is ready in spring

Hogs were butchered once the weather turned cold. In the Great Smoky Mountains, the National Park Service says, this often happened around the end of November, because cold weather helped preserve the meat while the salt cure did its work through the winter.

Virginia curemaster Sam Edwards of Edwards Virginia Smokehouse told Garden & Gun in 2021 that hogs were harvested as early as December and went into cure in January and February, then into the smokehouse. By his calendar, the first edible hams were getting ready around Easter, which he says is why people, in Virginia at least, eat ham on Easter.

Easter: America never warmed to lamb

Much of the world eats lamb at Easter. In the same Garden & Gun piece, food historian Robert Moss said Americans never developed a strong taste for lamb and that wool production made lamb prices swing. Historian David Shields of the University of South Carolina said good sheep pasture was scarce in most of the South.

Those explanations do not cancel each other out. All of them can be true, and none is proven to be the reason.

Christmas: every country tells it differently

In Sweden the glazed ham anchors the julbord, the Christmas buffet. A popular story links it to ancient boar sacrifices, but Swedish Wikipedia calls that link highly unclear, and food historian Richard Tellström told SVT that the cold, lightly cured and glazed Christmas ham reached Swedish tables around 1870 to 1890. Call it a 19th-century tradition with older roots. Our Swedish julskinka is boiled, then crusted in egg, mustard and breadcrumbs.

In the Philippines, GMA News reports that Spanish colonizers brought ham because a preserved meat survived the long voyage, and that friars served it at Noche Buena, the feast after Christmas Eve Mass. The Freeman (Philstar) says the pineapple-glazed version is now the most popular Filipino hamon. In Britain and Ireland, cooked gammon joints are a Christmas regular.

Today's ham works for any holiday

Most holiday hams in American stores are fully cooked and spiral-sliced, so the season no longer matters. USDA FSIS says a cooked ham vacuum-packed in a federally inspected plant can be eaten cold, or reheated in an oven set no lower than 325°F to 140°F. Our brown sugar and mustard spiral ham glazes it at the end.

For the rest of the holiday table, see our Christmas recipes.

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