A recent Numerator study finds 87% of Americans plan to celebrate Christmas. Three-fourths of those mark the holiday by gathering with family and friends, either on Dec. 25 or on Christmas Eve. For millions of Italian-Americans, the evening meal before the birth of the Christ child is an often elaborate meal called the Feast of the Seven Fishes.
A centuries-old Catholic church tradition of not eating meat before holidays like Easter and Christmas morphed, at some point lost to history, into its own unique thing in Italy: Festa dei sette pesci. Italian immigrants to the United States in the 1800s brought it with them.
