For nearly a decade, I’ve designed and printed a menu for every Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner I’ve hosted.
I didn’t plan to start a tradition. The first one was practical: I had a complicated meal coming together with multiple courses, multiple sides, and a couple of dishes I’d never made before. I wanted to write it all down so I could think through the timing. Somewhere between the rough draft and the dinner, I decided to format it like a real restaurant menu. Print it out. Set one at each place.
People kept the menus. Took them home. Asked if I was going to do it again next year.
So I did.
What I didn’t see coming was that the menus would leave the house.
Zach started bringing them to work to show his coworkers. His coworkers started asking for photos of the actual food. Then I started sharing the menus on social media. Friends started joking that they wanted to come for dinner — and also asking for photos of the food. Bluesky followers started asking. Instagram. Facebook acquaintances I’ve never met in person but who are part of my circle. People I barely know offline now reliably ask me, every November and every December: “are you doing a menu this year? can I see it? what are you making?”
The menu isn’t just for the people at the table anymore. It’s for everyone. Friends, family, coworkers, social media acquaintances, a handful of strangers. I’m not entirely sure how that happened, but at this point I’d disappoint a lot of people if I stopped.
Ten years in, the menus have become their own thing. Hand-lettered titles. Watercolor botanicals matched to the season. Courses laid out the way a printed dinner card would lay them out: starters, mains, sides, dessert, drink. They take longer to design than most of the cooking does, and that’s part of the point.
What this section holds
This is the home for the menus themselves. Each year, when I post the printed menu, it lives here. Christmas. Thanksgiving. Sometimes other holiday meals if the meal earned it (a particularly ambitious New Year’s Eve, an Easter dinner that came together right).
You’ll find:
- The menu image itself, designed to be readable on the blog or printed at home
- A short note about the meal, the year, what worked, what didn’t
- Cross-links to any recipes from the menu that have their own posts on karacooks
These aren’t recipe posts; they’re documentation. Snapshots of a meal in a year. If you want the actual recipes, look at the cross-links, or the Recipes category.
Why I keep doing this
Holidays are loud. The cooking is intense. The day itself goes fast. The menu is a small, quiet act of intention: this is the meal we made, on this day, for these people. Printed. Permanent. Holdable.
Years from now, when I can’t remember exactly what we ate for Christmas 2022 or Thanksgiving 2019, the menu will still be in a stack somewhere, and on this blog, and I’ll know. That’s the whole point.
It’s also one of the few times during a holiday week when I get to slow down, sit with the design software, and make something pretty just because it’s nice to make something pretty.
What’s coming
A “Decade of Holiday Menus” roundup post is on the horizon, once I’ve gathered all the years together properly. There are ten of them now. Seeing them lined up shows the through-lines: the foods that come back every year, the seasons of my cooking, the recipes I outgrew and the ones I kept.
In the meantime: this is the front door of the Holiday Menus archive. Whichever year you wandered in from, welcome.
P.S. If you’ve been to one of these dinners and you still have your menu somewhere, that makes me happier than you can probably imagine.
P.P.S. The watercolor botanicals get more elaborate every year. By Christmas 2030 the menus are going to look like illuminated manuscripts. I make no apologies.
P.P.P.S. Yes, I know I should have started this section years ago. Better late than never.