The Australian family of today will sit down to a Christmas dinner that stars honey-glazed ham as its centrepiece, followed by a table full of other sumptuous holiday treats, but many of their ancestors would have enjoyed a different dish for their Yuletide repast, the Christmas goose! We will read about this fabled faire of olden days in the pages of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, or see it in the countless screen adaptations of that venerable ghost story of Christmas, but it won’t be found on many tables Down Under! 

Everybody loves the wonderful traditions of the Christmas season, the stirring music, the sparkling decorations, the beautifully wrapped gifts, and most especially the scrumptious Christmas Gourmet Food that we all stuff ourselves silly with so we have to sleep it off through most of Boxing Day! It’s all simply lovely and very tasty, but one can’t help but wonder whatever happened to the old goose of Christmas’s past?

Roast goose was very much the traditional Christmas choice in England, as evidenced by the yuletide carol-

“Christmas is coming. The goose is getting fat. Please put a penny in the old man’s hat. If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do. If you haven’t got a ha’penny, God bless you!”

There were also the “six geese a-laying” that my true love gave to me on the sixth day of Christmas, possibly to rebuild the population after so many geese were eaten on the holiday! Goose was also historically featured as the main course on the feast day of Michaelmas, a celebration on the winter solstice that marked the end of the harvest and the changing of the seasons. Long before that an offering of roast goose was made to the Norse gods Thor and Odin in thanks for a successful harvest during the Yule. As Christmas replaced the old seasonal celebrations, goose became the roast of choice for the Christmas feast in merry old England.

When old Scrooge learned the error of his miserly ways the first thing he did on Christmas morning was to buy the impoverished Cratchit family the biggest goose they had ever seen in atonement for his years of neglecting his stalwart employee and his family’s well being. After that it was said that Scrooge kept Christmas well, and was a jolly good fellow to the end of his days, having put on a few stone from eating so much fatty goose!

So, what happened? Why did the goose vanish from our Christmas table? One might think that since they famously fly south for the winter, we might enjoy having a few to dine on, but alas, a goose dinner has become as rare as hen’s teeth! In America it was replaced by the turkey, another large and ungainly yard fowl that happens to be very tasty, and these days roast beef has supplanted the goose in the UK as the holiday feast of choice, and ham for we Aussies, but why?

The answer is economics it seems, geese are noisy and more difficult to raise, making them quite a bit more expensive, and so other, less expensive meats supplanted the grand old goose of Dickens’s time.