Cooking Up Christmas in Kentucky: Occupation and Tradition in the Stream of Time

What makes the Christmas meal successful "is just having family all together and sharing." This statement summarizes the meaning of the Christmas meal for the older women in rural Kentucky who participated in this study. Older women in eastern Kentucky are the orchestrators of this important, ritual meal, as were their mothers and grandmothers before them. This paper presents the Kentucky findings from a multi-site research project exploring older women's experiences of food related occupations at Songkran in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and Christmas in Auckland, New Zealand and Eastern Kentucky, USA. Data were collected through three focus group interviews from 23 eastern Kentucky women aged 65 and older. The narratives of these women revealed rich and complex interrelationships among the food occupations of the elder women, the matrilineal transmission of women's family and cultural roles, and the women's ability to adapt physically, temporally and emotionally to aging and to familial and cultural change.