Carrie Underwood Spends 'All Day Cooking' The Best Christmas Dishes
By Kelly Fisher
November 30, 2023
For Carrie Underwood, celebrating the holiday season is all about two things: family and food.
The powerhouse singer-songwriter is getting ready for Christmas with her family — including husband Mike Fisher, the couple’s two young sons, Isaiah and Jacob, and their extended families — and spending “all day cooking.” Underwood shared, via her record label, all of the signature dishes she makes to celebrate Christmas every year.
“My perfect Christmas, generally we do a lot of traveling around Christmas. We’ll go see either my family or my husband’s family. I’ll spend all day cooking,” Underwood said. “I’ll make a small turkey, even though I don’t eat turkey. I’ll make myself some tofurkey; cranberry sauce, of course. Of course, sweet potato casserole. You have to have that. That’s one of my favorites because it’s a side dish and dessert, but I’ll just make a ridiculous amount of food. Just celebrate, have a fire, we wait for Santa and open our presents, then we’re off to see the next group of family. It’s all about watching it through my sons’ eyes and just getting to spend time with family.”
Underwood — who released a special edition of her Christmas album, My Gift, with three new tracks in 2021 — also shared menu items she loves to cook for the holiday meal, including: broccoli rice casserole, a macaroni dish, deviled eggs, pecan pie (Fisher’s favorite), pumpkin pie (Underwood’s favorite), green bean casserole, and, of course, making Christmas cookies with her son.
“I love to cook… I love to feast. I love to get around the table,” Underwood said. “There’s way too much food to eat and everybody’s bellies are full and everyone’s happy and thankful and enjoying the food and the company.”
Underwood said she often opts to wait until after Thanksgiving is over to decorate for Christmas; however, this year, she decorated earlier, even though it’s “not really something that I would like to do.”
“I think the ideal time to decorate for Christmas is the weekend right after Thanksgiving,” Underwood said. “It’s like Thanksgiving’s over, you just bust out all of the Christmas stuff. That’s when it really kinda starts getting chilly outside, and you get to start making fires in the fireplace and really start putting the Christmas presents under the tree. There’s nothing sadder than a Christmas tree up with no presents underneath it, so I don’t really think that you want to get your Christmas tree up too early, but this year I was a little earlier than normal because we had Thanksgiving and then head out to Vegas for my Reflection shows and I had to get everything up before I left.”
Listen to a few of Underwood's My Gift songs below, and find the full special edition on iHeartRadio here.