What 30 years of Food Network Christmases have taught me about the holidays (and myself)

For as long as the Food Network has been celebrating Christmas, I’ve been watching. On Nov. 23, 1993, the network was launched with shows like “Essence of Emeril” and “Desserts with Debbi Fields” and then six months later, I was born. Since then, the channel has shaped how I celebrated the holidays. 

When I was nine, for instance, I received an Emeril Lagasse-branded miniature chef’s uniform, complete with a starchy white coat and toque. I wore them the next December when I launched my own neighborhood cookie delivery service, The Batter Bowl, which served only two varieties: my mom’s chocolate chip and Sandra Lee’s five-ingredient, semi-homemade (yet foolproof) sugar cookies, both of which I’d transport to customers around our suburban Chicago cul-de-sac in a small pull-along wagon. 

I watched all the “Good Eats” Christmas specials — “It’s a Wonderful Cake,” “The Cookie Clause,” “School of Hard Nogs,” and “Twas The Night Before Good Eats” — with interest and dreamed of eating around Ina Garten’s cozy dinner table, lit with candles and decorated with holly. 

Even today, my family isn’t really a Hallmark Christmas movie family, or even the type that will tune in and out of the inevitable 24-hour “A Christmas Story” marathons. Instead, our background viewing during December has become an almost “Nutcracker”-like whirlwind of on-screen bakers dashing around their competitors with gingerbread pieces and a plump pastry bag of royal icing, a kaleidoscopic array of sprinkles, nonpareils and tiny decorative candies at their disposal. 

I could venture a few guesses as to how this came and remains to be, but — aside from a few family members possessing a genuine love of cooking — I think it can be largely attributed to how pleasantly neutral the programming is. Some food television will artfully prompt questions about politics or religion, which, during the holidays, inevitably seem to open the door for other, more pointed inquiries like, “Why aren’t you married yet?” or “Who says you need therapy?” 

“Holiday Baking Championship: Gingerbread Showdown” will not prompt these questions. It will usher you from sugar-coated episode to sugar-coated episode, and on a larger scale, from year to year. 

Over the last 30 years, the Food Network’s programming has experienced an overall shift that feels perhaps most evident around the holidays. This isn’t a novel observation. When the network originally launched, it did so with what have come to be known as “stand-and-stir” shows, standard instructional programs that used to take up the majority of the channel’s airtime. But over the last three decades, thanks in part to the Food Network, food became more integrated into pop culture at large. 

Chefs are no longer just chefs; they are celebrities and humanitarians. Everyone, from Paris Hilton to Selena Gomez, wants a cooking show. Prestige television, like “The Bear,” centers around our collective appetite for kitchen dramas. And the Food Network became something of a competition series generator, launching new programs and personalities with stunning frequency. Whether this is what longtime viewers of the network actually want is a topic of perennial debate (as evidenced by the numerous, spirited Reddit threads about it). 

I used to have stronger feelings about it myself, but I think in these debates, people are often actually trying to grapple with bigger questions about how they want their holiday to look and feel, something that comes with both a lot of personal and societal pressure. I know that I certainly am. 

As a kid raised in a particularly conservative branch of Christianity, I thought that my future would consist of getting married at a very young age and then having several children in quick succession. That was the template of purity that was laid out for me, so any future Christmases that I envisioned for myself saw me catering to an amorphous, faceless family of my own. I didn’t know who they would be, just that they would be there and I would be expected to care for them. But, to borrow a line from Jurassic Park (another piece of pop culture that just celebrated its 30th anniversary), life finds a way. 

When I was 17, I called off an engagement and dropped out of Bible college to forge a new path, decisions that, over a decade later, still fill me with immense gratitude, a little pride and the occasional pang of what can only be described as phantom guilt, that particular feeling of being sorry that you don’t actually feel sorry about something. It also means that the holidays now feel a little more open and, sometimes, a little more rudderless. 

Perhaps inspired by the milestone birthday, I’ve spent the last several weeks combing through artifacts of holidays past to see what sparked a little joy: There’s the outline of the Chicago-style hot dog I painted for my Dad a few years ago, a bundle of Christmas cards, a matchbook from some red sauce joint that served as a last-minute dinner on a snowbound DC holiday. And, thanks to the surprisingly expansive archive on Discovery+, all of the Food Network Christmas programs I used to watch. I’ve spent hours sifting back through old episodes of “Essence of Emeril,” “Everyday Italian” and “Barefoot Contessa,” augmented with a few newer favorites like “Girl Meets Farm.” 

The experience has reminded me of the ways that food was a conduit to the life I have now, exposing me to lifestyles and cultures other than my own. It reminded me that holidays are truly what you make them; it often takes real time and effort to produce the “holiday magic” that is so easy to take for granted, whether it’s in the form of a gigantic multi-tiered gingerbread  chalet or a cozy Christmas dinner. 

It also reminded me in a really concrete way that the more things change, the more they stay the same. 

My parents have long moved out of my childhood home, but in a bizarre twist of fate, they recently moved into one designed by the same architect. The floorplan is nearly identical. When I spoke with my mom on the phone the other day about an upcoming visit, we joked that I would experience major déjà vu; I had never been in this house, but yet I had. Since I’ll be going during December, it will also sound exactly the same: the soundtrack of whisks, countertop mixers and countdown clocks emitting from the television, covering the silences of things left unsaid.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story erroneously listed the launch of Food Network as April 19, 2003. This story has been updated with the correct date: Nov. 23, 2003.