As I have been trying to plan out fun things to do as a family in 2020 I had a really random, fun idea. I was telling my kids how there are food holidays for every day of the year and they thought that was so cool! We looked up all the birthdays in our family and laughed at some of the ironic ones like National Catfish Day for my child who is by far the pickiest one in our family and doesn’t even like bacon! Who doesn’t like bacon?! And my child with a severe peanut allergy’s birthday falls on National Peanut Brittle Day--I mean, you can’t make this stuff up! And my birthday is National Coffee day and I don’t even drink coffee so a lot of these were pretty much duds.

I had the wacky idea that at some point this year we should have a crazy feast that incorporates something from everyone’s birthday and that would be a really fun time making all this random, new food and it would really be a fun memory.


It almost kind of reminds me of those funny little charts you’ll see on Facebook that will say: Take the first letter of your first name, your birth month, and the letter of your last name and it will populate some sort of random funny phrase based on whatever theme it is. This time it is a mix and match feast.

So for my family, if we straight up went with the food holidays only on our birthdays, our feast would consist of:

• Catfish
• Coffee
• Peanut Brittle
• Raspberry Cream Pie
• Root Beer Float

I think that I will incorporate some of the monthly holidays instead of some of these daily holidays because honestly that meal doesn’t sound very appetizing at all as a whole! But I am totally going to do this and have the Great Food Holiday Feast of 2020! You should totally look up all the holidays for your family members and do the same thing! Here is what our menu will look like:

Main Dish:

Well, since our roundup is basically one protein and the rest are some form of desserts or another, unfortunately, we don’t have much of a choice other than to eat the catfish for our main course. I don’t live in the south, so I don’t know how easy it would be to get catfish near me, but thankfully there is an amazing place near me where I can get authentic, New Orleans style po’ boys and fried catfish is one of the options, so boom! Done with the catfish.


Side Dish #1:

We are going to forego the coffee and peanut brittle and look for other monthly theme ideas to replace those two and get some savory side dishes instead. So I’m going to look for other options in January and September.

  For January my side dish type of items have got to be from “national slow cooking month” or “national soup month”. 

I’m going to choose the soup option. I will always choose soup any chance I can get! My favourite soup in this world is the corn chowder from the Lazy Dog restaurant. It is absolute perfection. So either I could pick up some soup from them or make my own copycat batch that could last through the week! Do you love corn chowder as much as I do?

Side Dish #2: 

I’m going to try to find another side dish from the monthly September holidays and it is plentiful with ideas. It is the month to celebrate potatoes, rice, or chicken. That will give me tons of options. The obvious route would be to get a side of fries with my po’ boys but if I wanted to make something from home I might make my famous potato salad. That would be nice with a delicious sandwich. 


Dessert #1: 

I don’t want to give up either of the desserts that we have remaining which are root beer floats and raspberry cream pie. I already looked up some recipes for raspberry cream pie and I can’t wait to make it because they say it tastes like a little bit lighter version of cheesecake and that the tartness of the raspberries pairs so well with the creaminess of the filling. 

Dessert #2: 

What’s life if you can’t live a little and have two desserts, am I right? Dessert #1 will be kind of while we’re still at the table and are chatting and have laughed our way into making a little room in our tummies for our delicious raspberry cream pie. Later that evening after a fun family movie or maybe a long board game like Monopoly, we’ll want to top off the night with a perfect root beer float. 

It is going to be a family fun filled night for the books! I can just see it now! I am totally going to do this--maybe in the summer or something and I will report back to let you know how it goes. What would the food holiday feast look like with the birthdays in your family? Does this sound like something you might try for 2020?