Festive Extremes

In 1881, Adolphus W. Greely set off to reach the Farthest North — an American expedition to break the British record of the highest northern latitude. His team’s eight-course Christmas dinner included mock-turtle soup, fricasseed guillemot, and spiced musk-ox tongue. 

In 1902 on expedition in Antarctica, Ernest Shackleton sweetened the usual polar diet of pemmican (a pressed cake of pounded dried meat mixed to a paste and melted fat) with a surprise Christmas pudding “hidden with his socks”. 

Fast-forward a hundred years, and technology has radically changed the face of polar exploration, but not the need to celebrate the seasons in style. 

For British climber Leo Holding, who spent the Christmas of 2017 in pursuit of the most remote mountain on Earth, his feast included a bottle of rum, some Christmas crackers, and (in his words): ‘some remarkably tasty dehydrated meals, prepared in a rural Dorset barn by a small company called Firepot and cooked on our trusty little stove with pure Antarctic snow.’ 

He's not the only one to rely on our menu of lightweight home-cooked meals during the festive period. Year on year we enjoy tales of your festive celebrations in the wild — from the coldest extremes of our world to the swells of the Atlantic.