A Midwestern Yankee transplanted to the Deep South via West Texas, I love the local foods of my transplanted locales. I use recipes as a baseline and improvise as I go. Family heirloom dishes like cabbage rolls, chicken pot pie (homemade noodles, really) and any of my grandma's cookie recipes. I like southwestern, cajun/creole and Mediterranean flavors and love experimenting with them. We eat a lot of shrimp because it's cheap here, and I like inventing shrimp and pasta dishes that can be made quickly. I don't really have traditions. Last Christmas my son made buckeye candy for gifts while I made my grandma's double decker jam cookies for the family, and that was a lot of fun. I hope to continue that for as long as he comes to visit at Christmas. My Christmas cookies last year were wonderful. I only spent a couple of hours baking, so it didn't eat up days of my time, but I had a wonderful variety and enough and to spare for desserts for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I forgot to put carrots in the stock when I made a homemade gumbo a couple of years ago. It still tasted ok, but it was GREEN. Eww.