A Bethlehem Shepherd’s dinner is a fun Christmas party idea for kids or for a new family tradition to start for Christmas Eve!
This Christmas menu is a creative way to celebrate the true reason for the season during the holidays.
How To Host a Bethlehem Shepherd’s Dinner for Christmas
This Bethlehem Biblical Themed Christmas Dinner is really fun for a kids’ Christmas party or for a quiet family evening at home for the holiday season.
What is a Christmas Shepherd’s Dinner?
Also called a Back to Bethlehem Dinner, this a fun Christmas party ideas to recreate the journey to Bethlehem, where Jesus was born, by serving traditional foods during the time.
You can dress up, recreate sights, smells, and sounds of the time (like we did – see below how we did it), and serve some of the types of foods they served during that time.
This holiday activity has been one of our favorite Christmas Eve traditions for the holiday season!
Shepherd’s Bethlehem Dinner Menu Ideas
Create a Bethlehem dinner menu made up of any of the foods from that time.
We had a lot of fun researching this before the party and learning a lot about the area and culture during that time.
You can include anything you want in your Bethlehem diner menu, but it’s fun to try to stay true to the time period as much as you can for your holy supper Christmas eve event.
Traditional foods of this time included:
- Unleavened bread/wheat (Unleavened bread is a flat bread without an agent to make it rise, like yeast*)
- Goat cheese / feta
- Goat’s milk
- Fish
- Eggs
- Vegetables
- Fresh Herbs
- Fruits
- Figs
- Dates
- Olives
- Olive Oil
- Pomegranates (learn how to cut and eat pomegranates)
- Grapes
- Honey
- Lentils
- Wine (or grape juice)
ALSO CHECK OUT: Best Experience Gifts For Christian Kids
What We Served For Our Bethlehem Shepherd’s Dinner
For our Bethlehem dinner, we ate:
- Grapes
- Cucumbers
- Flat bread (we used Naan*)
- Feta cheese
- Nuts
- Olive oil with fresh rosemary
- Roasted figs with honey (I could only find dried figs, but I used this recipe to roast them and we all loved them with the honey!)
- Pickled onions
- Pomegranate seeds
- Olives (black and green)
- Halva
- Honey
- Fresh Herbs and spices
*You can use pita bread or naan as your flat “unleavened” bread (which is as close as we got).
We did water, but you can serve grape juice with your Christmas dinner, too.
How To Serve A Bethlehem Dinner
For your Shepherd’s Dinner, make a communal, family-style shared dishes, with simple, communal platters and bowls that everyone shares .
Food items during that time were eaten with mostly with hands instead of utensils, so have fun with it!
We added individual finger bowls (small bowls for each person) with water so people could regularly rinse their fingers, which ended up being a great idea.
How To Create A Back To Bethlehem Experience
We went all our with our Shepherds Dinner and wanted to also create the smells and sounds of the Middle East during that time.
We did this by using Frankincense & Myrrh sticks like this, using only candles as lighting, and also playing sounds and music from that area.
I ended up using the San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble cd of music (which was fabulous).
After this Christmas party, we all agreed that the incense and the music in a candlelit room were really what made this party because it gave us sights, sounds, and tastes of the time!
Christmas Bible Verses
If you want to include reading the Biblical account of Christ’s birth and the Jesus was born in Bethlehem Bible verses, use these:
- Matthew 1:18-23
- Matthew 2:1-12
- Luke 2:7
- Luke 2:21
- Luke 2:11-14
- Matthew 2:11-12
I hope you have as much fun with your Christmas Bethlehem Shepherd’s dinner as we did!
