Christmas 'lunch'

Teetime When does breakfast become lunch?
When smoked salmon and Bucks Fizz come into the equation! ?
And Brunch becomes lunch when a preprandial G&T is offered.

Just to confuse matters when does breakfast become brunch and when does brunch become lunch?

Oh this could run and run phoenix ?‍♀️ ?‍♂️ ?‍♀️ ?‍♂️

We were once invited to a friend’s house for supper, at around 8.30pm. As we had just moved to Yorkshire we didn’t know what to expect, nor whether to eat beforehand,
It turned out to be a substantial offering including fruit cake and cheese, a delicious Yorkshire combination. But it was definitely not a main evening meal.
In Yorkshire you eat breakfast, dinner and tea, tea being a cooked meal around 5 or 6 or when people get home.
I grew up with breakfast, dinner and tea because we always ate our main meal around 12- 1 pm.
Now we have a light lunch and an evening meal, except on Sundays when we eat a Sunday roast at 1pm.. I rarely use the word dinner, except for Christmas dinner.
It has to be Christmas dinner, whatever time you eat the feast.

I think I'm getting a sense of deja vu, but of course I may be just imagining it!

I have always preferred to eat Christmas dinner in the evening although I have quite often served it earlier in deference to family wishes. There was one year when a friend was staying and some other friends came round for drinks and nibbles in the morning. The drinks and nibbles continued well into the afternoon and the result was that no one felt like Christmas dinner in the evening. So we had roast goose followed by Christmas pudding on Boxing Day.

Yawn

Do we have to go through all this yet again until December 25?

I may faint...…...somebody agrees with me.

Bit like the off side rule then Vampirequeen
I agree with lemongrove and Maw Christmas dinner and wedding breakfasts are exceptions.

Blame the teachers.
The problem is that schools have dinnertime, dinner duty, dinner money, dinner ladies; usually 12.00 pm onwards. Sometimes they have lunch breaks at about 10.30 to 11 am.
My mother-in-law(ex) used to wince when I referred to dinner in the middle of the day. We also had tea at teatime, (5.30).
How she suffered.

I am not sure you can actually be pedantic about this! It is a variable without a fixed rule so no right or wrong!

If you eat the meal after 3:00p.m I would call it dinner..as it would be getting dark
If it is eaten between noon and 3;00 I would say lunch!

But the terms dinner /lunch are so interchangeable and regional that it is not a pedant issue just a preference!

How has this come up again now?!!! last post was in 2017...

vampirequeen agree entirely except for cream tea. A cream tea is a pot of tea with scones,cream and jam. What you describe sounds more like afternoon tea

As a closet pedant I agree with you Elegran. I blame my wonderful English teacher.
*MawBroon I love that mug!

DM used to say 'I do like a 'gravy dinner'' even though they always ate it at lunch-time.
Followed by tea at about 6 pm.

Breakfast, dinner and tea here. Lunch was 'snack' in our house. Dinner was in the evening, unless it was a lighter kind of meal, then it was 'tea'.

One DGD never has gravy! and a friend complained to me that she went out for a 'Christmas lunch' at a rather posh hotel and they brought it out with gravy on it! and she was put right off.
(so it was Christmas dinner, not Christmas lunch and wasn't on Christmas Day anyway.)

It may be a little of both rubysong. It appears that, by your measurement, I will go relatively dinnerless as I rarely have gravy.

To me, if it's got gravy on it, it is dinner, whatever the time of day. It doesn't worry me how others describe their meals. I think it is regional rather than class.

Like this Elegran?

Do you live in a different country to me Elegran?

Lunch v dinner might have been a class thing in more southern regions, but i know many upper-class Yorkshire folk who always talked of breakfast, dinner and tea, just like we commoners. I also know a lot of people of all classes who have changed the terminology they use over the years, some because they thought it made them sound more posh!

Personally, although now I swap randomly between lunch and dinner for the midday meal, I just can't bring myself to say dinner for an evening meal. That means that if our Christmas dinner is going to be eaten after 4pm, we refer to it as the Christmas meal!

All pedantry sounds to someone somewhere like "I know better than you", snobbery, especially to those who don't share that particular particularity.

Pedants know that, which is why they suffer in silence for a lot of the time. Meanwhile, they watch helplessly while spelling, grammar and subtlety of vocabulary go down the drain, and Mrs Malaprop is the nation's role model.

Is the OP really about pedantry - it sounds like 'I know better than you do' snobbery to me. As I am not inviting you please don't worry yourself about what I call my meals.

I meant too add that lunch to me is a light meal, as is supper (which I never eat these days).