How Butter Became the Emotional and Culinary Star of the Holidays

Article by Chadwick Boyd | Photos by Chadwick Boyd | Published December 23, 2025

“Butter, no matter how unlimited, is a precious substance not lightly to be wasted,” M.F.K. Fisher wrote. It’s a sentence that feels less like instruction and more like an invocation. Fisher understood that butter was never just fat or flavor. It was care made visible, something shared and earned. And yet, butter has always invited joy and abundance – without apology.

On the PBS series, Baking with Julia, Julia Child and her guests went through thousands of sticks of butter over the life of the show, folding, creaming, melting and pouring it into recipes meant to teach confidence rather than restraint. Somewhere between Fisher’s reverence and Child’s exuberance is where butter truly lives: serious, generous, unmistakably celebratory.

In December, butter takes on a particular gravity. It announces itself before it ever appears on the table. The soft foam as it melts toward caramel. The sheen it leaves behind when rolls are brushed straight from the oven. The faint drama it brings to shortbread as it blisters and browns at the edges. These are not neutral cues. They are signals that tell us something meaningful is underway. They feel blissful and safe, almost protective.

Butter in winter pulls us out of ordinary time. It draws us back into memory:  a childhood kitchen warmed by the stove, a holiday table set for guests we haven’t seen in a year, a familiar hand moving with confidence, repeating motions learned years before. Butter doesn’t rush these moments; it deepens them.

The instinct to reach for butter during the holidays is not abstract. It is acquired and reinforced. For author and baker Erin Jeanne McDowell, celebrated for her “All Buttah Pie Crust,” that instinct is seasonal by design. “The rest of the year, people might make different choices,” she says. “But when winter comes, and we want to feel cozy and satiated, we aren’t afraid of comfort food…we use the good stuff.”

For McDowell, butter has always lived at the center of that choice. One of her earliest memories involves whipped butter served in small bowls at a local steakhouse, portioned with an ice cream scoop and guarded carefully through the meal. Later came baking with her mother and grandmother, where butter wasn’t just present, it was foundational. 

“It became the ingredient I always had on hand,” she says. “In significant quantity.”

That pattern is not unique. It repeats across cultures and generations, wherever butter has been made, used and saved for moments that matter.

Butter’s history is ancient, dating back thousands of years. But its origins are rooted in daily work. As early pastoral societies began keeping animals for milk, butter emerged not through invention but rather through use and discovery.

In places like Mesopotamia, Central Asia and Northern Europe, milk left to rest in storage vessels allowed its richer fat to rise to the surface. Movement did the rest. Milk carried on journeys, stored in animal skins or clay containers, was jostled just enough for fat to separate and form. What began as milk became something more concentrated, viscous and easy to keep.

Butter was made whenever milk was plentiful. What changed as the year turned toward December wasn’t production, but reliance. As fresh food became less dependable and preservation more necessary, butter took on greater importance. Across regions, clarified versions – butter gently melted and strained of its milk solids – developed in warmer climates, while solid butter remained central to cooler ones. The details of how it was made and stored differed, but its role was consistent.

That role is still recognizable in the foods that anchor winter and holiday tables around the world. Across Europe, butter anchors December cooking through structure, patience, and ritual. In France, desserts like Bûche de Noël turn butter into ceremony. Eggs and butter are whipped until pale, creating a delicate sponge cake to welcome smooth buttercream before being rolled.

In Germany and Central Europe, butterplätzchen and spitzbuben, delicate holiday treats, are pressed from chilled dough, while stollen, a traditional German fruit bread, is brushed after baking and wrapped to rest. In Italy, butter lends distinct tenderness and structure to a multitude of Christmas cookies, like cucidati and anginetti, their fruit fillings, soft crumb and icing surfaces reliably returning to celebration tables year after year.

In other parts of the world, butter shifts form, but not its meaning. In South Asia, clarified butter is warmed gently before cooking begins, its aroma blooming with fragrant spices before deepening lentils that are simmered low and slow. That same richness carries into winter sweets like barfi and halwa, made for winter festivals. 

In Ethiopia, niter kibbeh, butter clarified and infused with aromatics, is kept ready through the season and spooned deliberately into stews meant to stretch long into the evening. Across Latin America, butter appears most clearly in seasonal baking. Alfajores, cookies made with butter-rich dough, are sandwiched and finished for Christmas celebrations in Argentina and Uruguay. In Mexico, Rosca de Reyes, a ring-shaped holiday bread, is fortified with butter and eggs, while in Brazil, panettone-style yeasted loaves rely on butter for softness, scent, and lift.

In each case, butter marks food made for fêtes and celebratory gatherings, for moments meant to linger and last.

At the American holiday table, those instincts come together easily. Cookies are stacked in festive tins. Potatoes are mashed until velvety and just long enough to hold a spoon. Biscuits, popovers and muffins are split open and slathered while still warm, steam briefly rising before disappearing. The dishes differ by household and heritage, but they are driven by the same desire: to make people feel welcome, cared for and at home. Butter shows up where the cooking is meant to feel reassuring, hospitable and safe.

That trust didn’t happen by accident. It was built over time, reinforced by repetition and carried forward by people who never stopped making butter with care. At Minerva Dairy in Ohio, the oldest continuously operating creamery in the United States, butter has been produced since the late 1800s. For Venae Watts, a fifth-generation co-owner, butter’s place in the kitchen has always been understood rather than explained. 

“The kitchen used to be the heart of the home,” she says. “And in that heart was butter.”

Minerva still makes butter in small batches, watching the churn closely, listening and looking for subtle shifts, knowing when to slow down or stop. It is work that depends on care and attention, the kind learned and passed on over time rather than written down. That carries through especially during the holidays when recipes and ingredients are purposefully chosen for how they reliably behave and the emotions they evoke. 

That meaning doesn’t end at the kitchen door. In recent years, butter has boldly entered the visual language of American home life and the holidays. Gift wrap is printed like waxed butter paper. T-shirts and hoodies are stamped proudly with “butter” emblazoned on the chest. Glass ornaments are shaped like butter sticks to dangle and sparkle on trees. Molds in the form of Christmas trees and Santa Claus are sold in the dairy section of most grocery stores. These aren’t jokes or novelties so much as modern expressions of adoration and reverence. Butter has become shorthand for comfort, generosity and care – a symbol people recognize, admire and respect.

Across centuries of family tables, the pattern repeats. “We ask for it,” Watts says. “Each year, repeating the same pattern of words, ‘pass the butter.’” The phrase barely interrupts conversation, yet it signals that the table is ready and the meal has settled in. 

In that way, butter’s role today mirrors its consistent place across history, geography and cultures. It isn’t chasing relevance. It doesn’t need to. It remains central to who we are as people and community, because it continues to do what it has always done: steady us, nourish us and help us feel at home.