24% Say This Is Their Favorite Holiday Dessert

Thanksgiving dinner is all about the main course (turkey, of course) as well as the trimmings, with desserts often relegated to the role of something that's merely nibbled on. After all, it's hard to find room in your overstuffed belly for more than that proverbial teensy sliver!  A few weeks later, though, desserts really come into their own, since Christmas — not just the day, but the entire season — is about all of the sweet treats (with the possible exception of sugar plums and figgy pudding, since who even knows what those are?)

Some of these desserts are things that we look forward to year after year –- everyone's got their favorite Christmas cookies, after all. Others are ... well, the kind of thing we put up with merely out of tradition. Candy canes, for one. Sure, they date back to ancient times (well, the late Renaissance, at least, per How Stuff Works) but they're pretty much the candy corn of Christmas — something we're only willing to eat (or not eat) once a year. And no, making them in "wacky" flavors doesn't make them any more desirable. 

Recently, Mashed polled 613 people to find out just which of the classic holiday desserts was something people really wanted to eat. The winner, surprisingly, is something that's actually more associated with a different holiday, but which is also enjoyed throughout the year.

Topping our holiday dessert poll with 24% of the votes was a perennial favorite that takes pride of place on many a Thanksgiving dessert table — at least, in households where pumpkin does not reign supreme — and that's pecan pie. 

Pecan pie is a classic southern dessert, and a 2018 Insider poll found it to be the top pie in 3 states: Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. It also constitutes the dessert course for Oklahoma's official state meal. So, what makes this dessert for all seasons particularly Christmassy? Not a thing, but you could always stick a sprig of holly on top.

The second-most popular holiday dessert was the more seasonable gingerbread cookies -– in gingersnap form, they're also a year-round thing, but once you break out the cookie cutters, they're Christmassy as all that. In third place was sweet potato pie, another southern favorite, while peanut butter blossoms were not far behind in 4^th place. Slightly less popular was peppermint bark, as a little of this super-sweet candy goes a long, long way. Way down at the bottom was — you guessed it — fruitcake, as well as a slightly more surprising loser, the holiday yule log cake (basically a big old Ho Ho with fancy frosting). It wound up in last place in last year's holiday treat poll, too, although fruitcake is fast closing the gap.