Q: Now that it's the holiday season, many people will be traveling away from home to celebrate with family and friends.

How can someone plan ahead and maintain a diet of healthy foods if your travels send you to a food desert with nary a vegetable in sight?

Sent by Marlene More

Every holiday season we ask a few friends to join us here at The Kitchn for a series of guest posts. The topics range from favorite holiday recipes to family memories and traditions. Today's guest: Terry Boyd. Terry is a longtime reader and community member of The Kitchn, and he writes his own blog, Blue Kitchen. I always learn something when I visit there!

Fresh rosemary adds a subtle, mysterious something extra to Hazelnut Rosemary Jam Cookies. And unlike so many holiday treats, they're not overly sweet. So they're perfect with a cup of tea — and when holiday guests drop by. More

Every holiday season we ask a few friends to join us here at The Kitchn for a series of guest posts. The topics range from favorite holiday recipes to family memories and traditions. Today's guest: Domenica Marchetti. Domenica is a widely-published food writer and columnist, and she has published some wonderful books on Italian cooking, including this year's favorite, The Glorious Pasta of Italy. Welcome Domenica!

Fried dough.

That is what our house smelled like on Christmas morning when I was growing up. Even as my sister, Maria, and I attacked the presents piled under the tree, our mother dashed back and forth from the living room to the kitchen, where she fried batches of calcionelli.

These golden-brown crescent-shaped pillows of sweet dough, filled with ground nuts and honey, are a specialty of my Italian mom's native region of Abruzzo. I imagine that as she stood there at the stove at our house in New Jersey, the aroma of honey and orange zest and fried dough brought her right back to her own childhood Christmases in the hilltop city of Chieti.

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Every holiday season we ask a few friends to join us here at The Kitchn for a series of guest posts. The topics range from favorite holiday recipes to family memories and traditions. Today's guest: Germaine Leece of Some Home Truths, an always thoughtful and inspiring blog. (We've peeked inside her own home kitchen in Sydney, too!) Welcome Germaine!

All families have their own Christmas traditions, some left over from childhood and carried through to the next generation and some that may have only recently appeared but feel just as important.

For my children, a new tradition began three years ago when my son came home from preschool with a bag full of 'Reindeer Food'. More

Q: Do you have any suggestions for what to make at an office Cook-Off? I would like to make something vegetarian, and it cannot be put in the oven (because we have a separate Bake-Off).

Any ideas?

Sent by Becky More

The holidays call for special treats, do they not? This is the only time of year, after all, that we dress up cakes to look like bark-skimmed logs and pipe out endless lacy patterns on cookies that will shortly be consumed. (Although, who actually eats all those gingerbread houses?) But all this work is worth it for the delight that a special treat can bring, not to mention the pleasure of carrying on tradition.

Today we are going back into our archives to bring you some of our most special holiday treats — treats like Duchess potatoes piped out into Christmas trees, and peppermint ice cream flecked with chocolate. There is homemade eggnog, and pretty peppermint-filled cookies, gingerbread latte and an honest-to-goodness croquemboche. More

Every holiday season we ask a few friends to join us here at The Kitchn for a series of guest posts. The topics range from favorite holiday recipes to family memories and traditions. Today's guest: Anne Zimmerman of Poetic Appetite, and author of An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher. We also toured Anne's kitchen this past year.

Have you ever spent Christmas away from home?

M.F.K. Fisher did in 1929. This was long before she was the famed food writer who composed evocative prose about the exquisite pleasures of the table. Then, she was a young bride who had just moved to Dijon, France with her new husband, Al. The two traveled South for Christmas, to a little town on the Mediterranean Coast called Cassis. On Christmas Eve, the couple drank rum punch and waited sleepily to go to Midnight Mass at a little church on the top of a high hill. More

Q: The hubs and I are driving north next week to spend Christmas with his family, and we're bringing a frozen 12-pound turkey that wasn't thawed or cooked during Thanksgiving. The trip will take 9 to 11 hours. I know the turkey should thaw in a fridge for about 3 days, but here's my question: We don't have a cooler and I haven't found one in stores that will fit the turkey.

What should we do? I was thinking about traveling with the frozen turkey on ice in a lined tub (then getting it into the fridge at our destination), or should we thaw the turkey first, then travel with it on ice? I would love to know what readers think and thanks in advance.

Sent by Mis P. More

Every holiday season we ask a few friends to join us here at The Kitchn for a series of guest posts. The topics range from favorite holiday recipes to family memories and traditions. Today's guest: Melanie Widmann of Coffee Tea Gastronomy. Melanie is a true tea aficionado, and I loved this small sweet project she had to share.

Last year, I purchased this amazing tea but the thought of putting it in a fillable tea bag and handing it to someone just seemed to lack presentation. The idea of how to share tea in a beautiful way then became the basis of a book that will be released in 2012, titled Gifting Tea. The tea tag is one of the most versatile ideas found in the book and is really just simple origami with a few embellishments. More

Q: My extended family is coming for Christmas Eve dinner. I need a menu that the vegetarians and those who do not like seafood would enjoy but is still upscale and elegant.

Do you have any suggestions?

Sent by Janet More