Traditionally, our family gets together every Christmas Eve for our yuletide meal. Aunties, uncles, children, parents and grandparents all under one roof devouring the spoils of the Christmas season. Then some years ago, my cousins started a new tradition: the Cousins Christmas Dinner, which, unlike the repast that our older relatives create, is always a little more decadent.

There's always good wine, lots of red meat and some manner of foie gras. Last year we bought 120 oysters, which we had to shuck. We're never doing that again. A few years ago we had a massive cote de bouef, on top of a roasted pork belly and a giant pasta pie.

And this year was no different—except someone came up with the idea of a turducken, and the rest, as the saying goes, is family history.

Thanks to good foresight on the part of our youngest cousin G, we got a de-boned chicken and duck from a butcher. And having read and reread Jeffrey Steingarten's account of his search for the authentic turducken in his book It Must Have Been Something I Ate, I decided that it was imperative I make three different stuffings for maximum flavour.

So here it is, our account of our first turducken in pictures. It wasn't as much work as I had imagined it would be (thanks in large part to the already deboned chicken and duck), and the process was wonderfully hilarious and just the thing to put us in the Christmas spirit. Every time I looked at the turducken I just had to laugh, it was ridiculously massive and a miracle that it fit in my oven.