Even for men who were fed eight pounds of meat a day, feasting was still the central part of the holiday.

Aboriginal and British culture came together brilliantly at one holiday -not at Fort Edmonton but at a different post. George Grant recalls a Christmas wherein the assembled gentlemen tried desperately to make a plum pudding using an old sugar sack, pemmican (a dish of powdered jerkey, fat and berries), and a few extras. Their high hopes seemed to fail when, in the middle of dinner, it was checked on and had more the consistency of stew than pudding. But the Chief Factor, or head of the fort, recommended sagely another half-hour of boiling while dinner went on. In the end, he was right, as the strange 'north-country' pudding turned out so deliciously that, as Grant reported, "there was not one of the party who did not hold out his plate for more."

Edmonton's 1848 Christmas dinner was no less spectacular. As reported by Paul Kane, he and the gentlemen sat down to dine on boiled buffalo fetus, a epicurean delight of the interior, buffalo tongue, buffalo hump, whitefish browned in buffalo marrow (seeing a theme?), dried moose nose, beavers' tail, wild goose, potatoes, turnips AND bread.