Holiday Season in Monaco

Monaco offers special cultural events and gala dinners throughout the Principality on Christmas Eve and on New Year’s Eve, including parades, concerts and activities for children. Monaco's hotels and restaurants offer special packages. On New Year's Eve at the stroke of midnight, revelers convene in the magnificent Casino Square to ring in the New Year.In Monaco, Christmas Eve was the occasion when all the members of a family would gather at their home to perform, as a preliminary act to the evening meal, the rite of the olive branch. Before sitting down, the youngest of the guests, or the oldest, soaked an olive branch in a glass of old wine. He approached the fireplace where a great fire of pine and laurel branches burned and with his little branch traced the sign of the Cross while pronouncing a few words on the virtues of the olive tree, a source of all kinds of good things. After this, everybody in turn would wet his lips in the glass of wine serving as an aperitif. Dinner traditionally consists of an enormous "brandamincium", a Monégasque dish of salt cod pounded with garlic, oil and cream, surrounded by "cardu", cardoon in white sauce; "barba-giuan", literally "Uncle John", stuffed fritters and "fougasses" flat crunchy biscuits sprinkled with sugared aniseed colored red and white, flavored with several drops of rum and orange-flower water.

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