As January 25th draws near and Burns Night starts to approach, a lot of people with Scots ancestry start thinking about haggis. There are, of course, lots of folks who'll run screaming in the opposite direction at the very mention of the word, freaked out by the thought of unmentionable wobbly organ meats. Well, to each his or her own.

All through Europe traditions of a time of cheerful mischief and "misrule" after Christmas abound -- memories of the role reversals that were part of the ancient Roman solstice feast of Saturnalia. Right down to our modern day, memories of this annual crazy time are preserved...sometimes in the food.

There's a tendency to think of the turkey as having been the traditional Christmas dinner for ages. But only a couple of centuries ago, turkeys would have been seen in Europe as pricey fad food -- a waste of time when there were better, cheaper and more traditional alternatives available: like goose.

These traditional figures, which have many other names in various Swiss dialects -- such as hanselmanne and bonhomme -- start turning up in bakeries in the German-speaking parts of Switzerland around December 6th, which is the feast of St. Nicholas...