Feast of the Seven Fishes 2026 is on Thursday

About Feast of the Seven Fishes

The Feast of the Seven Fishes is a family meal, not a holiday with a founder or official status. On Christmas Eve, many Italian American households serve a long dinner of fish and shellfish: salt cod (baccalà), fried smelts, calamari, clams, shrimp, octopus or eel, depending on the family. Some tables stop at seven dishes, others serve a dozen or more, and plenty of families never count at all.

Its roots are religious. Catholics traditionally abstained from meat on the vigil before a major feast, so fish took the place of meat on Christmas Eve. In Italy the occasion is simply la Vigilia, the eve, and National Geographic notes that a fish dinner on that night is mainly a southern Italian custom. Most Italians who arrived in the US between the 1880s and the early 1900s came from the rural south, and the meal grew larger and more symbolic in their new home, partly as a way to hold on to family identity.

The name itself is much younger than the custom, and no one knows who coined it. The Philadelphia Inquirer has traced its own earliest mention to a December 1983 article about a Center City restaurant's version. A Drexel University professor emeritus quoted by the paper said he never heard the phrase growing up in Brooklyn in the 1960s and 1970s, and suspects it caught on in Philadelphia first.

Why seven is also unsettled. Common explanations point to the seven sacraments or other uses of the number in the Bible and Catholic tradition, but none of them is documented as the original reason.

Sources: National Geographic: What is the Feast of the Seven Fishes? (2023), The Philadelphia Inquirer: Where to eat the Feast of the Seven Fishes in the Philadelphia area (2021). How we check dates.

How to mark Feast of the Seven Fishes

• Plan a Christmas Eve menu around a few seafood dishes your family already loves, then add one new one, such as baccalà salad or fried smelts.
• Soak salt cod a few days ahead: it needs to sit in cold water, changed often, before cooking.
• Ask older relatives which fish dishes their parents served on Christmas Eve, and write the recipes down.
• Make it a shared meal, with each household bringing one course so no one cooks all seven.
• Buy from a local fishmonger and ask which shellfish and fish are in season and sustainably caught.

Feast of the Seven Fishes dates