Christmas style means both red and green chile on the same plate. You order it in a New Mexico restaurant when you can't pick a side, and what arrives is one sauce over half the dish and the other over the rest, sitting next to each other rather than stirred together. It's the standing third answer to the official state question, which is "Red or green?" and which the New Mexico Legislature put on the books in 1999.
That's the definition, and if that's all you came for, you're done. The part worth another five minutes is why the two sauces taste different at all, which dishes actually improve when you split them, and how to put a Christmas plate on your own table in December when you're nowhere near a restaurant that would ask you the question.
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What Christmas style means
A New Mexican server asks "red or green?" because nearly everything on the menu can be sauced either way. Say "Christmas" and you get both. On a plate of enchiladas that looks like red poured down one side and green down the other with a visible line between them, and the reason it works is that nothing gets blended. You taste red, then you taste green, then you go back and forth for the rest of the plate!
Two things people get wrong, and they're worth clearing up before you order. The first is that Christmas is a mixture, like one pink sauce, which it isn't in any restaurant that would use the word. The second is that it's a compromise for people who don't know what they want, which is unfair to a very good way of eating: splitting the plate is the only way to taste both sauces against the same tortilla, the same cheese and the same onion, and plenty of people who know exactly which one they prefer order Christmas anyway.
The word travels past the plate too. You'll see it on gift tins, on a sheet pan of rolled tacos with half red and half green, and on a jar of chile that already has both in it. In New Mexico that jar also goes by Harvest Blend or X-Mas, and all three mean the same thing.
Where the word came from, and why nobody can date it
Credit goes to a server named Martha Rotunno at a small restaurant on West San Francisco Street in Santa Fe. The owner's account, published in the Santa Fe New Mexican in November 2024, is that she landed on "Christmas" because the plate came out red and green, and that she was far too modest to ever claim it. She started there in 1975 and worked the floor for twenty one years.
Here's the part almost nobody publishes. Nothing fixes the date. The earliest printed use anyone has turned up is a Santa Fe travel piece from November 1989, where a food historian tells the reader to just ask for "Christmas." It appears again in print in 1990, in a Southwestern cookbook in 1994, and in the Santa Fe School of Cooking's own cookbook in 1995, by which point it's described as simply how you order. So the term was common usage by the end of the eighties, and the woman credited with inventing it was on the floor from 1975. That leaves a fourteen year window with no document in it.
Which is how most restaurant language works. Somebody says a funny thing on a Tuesday, the next table hears it, and thirty years later it's in a state brochure. Any page that hands you a confident year is guessing, the same way most of the internet guesses about what actually makes Hatch chile Hatch chile.
Red and green are the same pod at different ages
This is the fact that makes the rest make sense, and it surprises people every time. Red chile and green chile are not two different peppers. They're the same plant, often the very same variety, picked at two different points in its life. Green chile is harvested at the mature green stage, when the pod has reached full size and is still firm. Leave that identical pod on the plant and it turns red, softens, and starts to dry down.
The timing comes out of NMSU's growing guide. Pods reach mature green roughly 35 to 50 days after the plant flowers, a green crop is ready about 120 days after planting, and a red crop takes about 165. The ideal red harvest in New Mexico is early October, and a hard freeze landing on pods that are still plump will split them and let mold in, which is why red gets picked or strung before real cold arrives. All of it is in NMSU Extension Guide H-230, Growing Chile Peppers in New Mexico.
What that extra month and a half does to the flavor is the interesting part. Green tastes bright and a little vegetal, closer to a roasted onion, and it sits forward on top of whatever you put it on. Red picks up sugar as it ripens, so it reads sweeter and earthier and folds into a dish instead of sitting on it. Red usually reaches your kitchen dried and reconstituted or cooked down into a proper red chile sauce, while green arrives roasted, peeled and chopped, and those two handling paths widen the gap further.
What the extra ripening does not reliably do is make the chile hotter. That gets repeated constantly and NMSU's own cultivar record doesn't support it: heat depends on genetics, weather, growing conditions and fruit age all together, which is why published Scoville figures for New Mexico varieties are averages rather than promises. The variety tells you far more than the color does. NuMex Big Jim averages around 6,500 Scoville units and New Mexico 6-4 lands near 900, and both are grown for green. The full release history is in NMSU Circular CR-706, The Chile Cultivars of New Mexico State University. So if you're ordering Christmas to split the difference on heat, that isn't what you're doing. Pick the heat level you actually want first, then decide on color.
What goes Christmas, and what doesn't
Not every dish takes the split, and knowing which ones do is most of what a New Mexican picks up without ever being taught. The rule underneath it is short: Christmas works wherever the chile is a sauce going on top, and it falls apart wherever the chile is cooked into the dish. You can split a plate. You cannot split a pot.
If you only try it on one dish, make it enchiladas. A pan of them is the cleanest test there is, because everything except the sauce stays identical, and you'll know inside two bites which side of the state question you're on. Build the two sides from green chile enchilada sauce and its red counterpart, keep a cooked red chile salsa on the table alongside, and red chile huevos rancheros the next morning will finish whatever's left. For anything in the pot-not-plate column, New Mexico green chile stew is the one to learn.
Two ways to do it in your own kitchen
You've got two real options, and they're genuinely different rather than the same thing twice.
One jar with both in it. Our flame roasted Hatch red and green blend is Christmas in a single 16 oz jar, and it's the one labeled Harvest Blend. It comes in Medium, and it's addictingly tangy, savory and smokey with a slightly sweet finish and a real kick behind it. Spoon it onto burritos, build enchiladas with it, stir it into eggs, or just set it out with chips and watch it vanish!
Two jars, plated side by side. This is the restaurant version and it's what I'd actually do if I were cooking for people. Open a jar of flame roasted Hatch green chile and a jar of flame roasted Hatch red chile, warm them separately, and pour each over its own half. It costs you a second saucepan and it buys you two things the blend can't: the real side by side comparison, and your pick of heat, since green and red both come in Medium and Hot while the blend is Medium. If you want a few of each on hand, shop the jar collection and mix the jars yourself.
How much you need is the same arithmetic as any other saucing job. A 9x13 pan of enchiladas takes about three cups of chile and feeds six to eight, so going Christmas means roughly a cup and a half of each color. A 16 oz jar holds about two cups, and that's an estimate from the net weight rather than a drained measurement, so one jar of red and one of green covers that pan with roughly a cup to spare between them. Two jars, one pan, both colors, and enough left for eggs in the morning.
One habit worth keeping either way: roasted chile carries its own liquid, so drain it for anything that has to set and keep the liquid for anything saucy or braised. The reasoning is in the guide to the mistakes people make cooking with Hatch chile. For more to do with the jars, there's a spiral bound New Mexico chile recipe book, the same thing as an instant download cookbook, and a free recipe archive.
When to order it for the holidays
Start with the case where you should skip us entirely. If you're in New Mexico between late September and the middle of October, don't order red chile from anybody. That's exactly when it comes off the field, the roasters that ran green all August switch over, and ristras go up on porches all over the state. Buy fresh red while it's in front of you, string what you don't cook, and you'll have red hanging in your kitchen all winter. That's a Saturday well spent and no jar on earth beats it. If you're there for the green run instead, our guide to bushels and sacks and the roasting walkthrough will get you through the afternoon, and the store locator will tell you who's carrying us nearby.
There's a second limit and it's ours. We freeze green chile, not red. Our frozen Hatch green chile comes in factory sealed 5 lb bags bundled into 10 and 20 lb orders, in Mild, Hot and XXHot, and it moves on UPS air so it lands in two days or less. There's no bulk Christmas style, because there's no frozen red to pair with it. If you want red in freezer volume for the year, that's a ristra or a fresh red harvest, not an order from us. Jars are where our red lives, and for most households a jar at a time is honestly the right size for red anyway, since you go through less of it than green.
So who should order? Anybody out of state, anybody past the harvest window, and anybody who wants Christmas style on the table in December, which is the whole point of a thing named after a holiday. We flame roast, peel and pack premium Hatch chile out of the Hatch Valley every harvest, red and green both, hand-picked at peak freshness, and the jars are shelf stable so December is no harder on them than August. If you want to read how the operation came together first, our story is short.
Now the calendar, because it's tighter than people expect and the carrier's schedule is the binding part. These are UPS's published 2026 dates rather than ours:
Christmas week 2026, by the carrier's calendar
- Friday, December 25: UPS is closed. No pickups and no deliveries at all.
- Thursday, December 24: deliveries run for every service, but pickups are air only and have to be arranged by December 18. Ground doesn't get collected that day.
- Wednesday, December 23: the last comfortable delivery day, and the one to aim at rather than squeeze past.
- Our own recommendation, not a published cutoff: get a frozen order in by the week of December 14 so the box leaves early in Christmas week, and get jars in by that same week so a late ground delivery still makes it.
That December 18 date is the one that catches people, because it sits a full week out and it quietly removes Christmas Eve as a shipping day. Plan around December 23 and nothing about the week has to be exciting. Jarred chile is the safer gift either way, since it's shelf stable and handles a porch and a long drive; frozen has to go air and somebody has to be home for it. Quantity is limited every year by the size of the Hatch harvest, because we're a small batch outfit working from one crop a year. Thank you for your understanding!
And if a frozen box ever lands on your porch warm to the touch, tell us and we'll put the whole order back, shipping and all. Nobody is going to make you prove anything. Love it, or it's on us. If you're buying for a restaurant or a shop rather than a kitchen, start at the wholesale page instead, and if you want to see what other people have said first, the reviews are all here.
Common questions
What does Christmas style mean in New Mexico?
It means both red and green chile on the same dish, one sauce over half of it and the other over the rest. It's the third answer to the official state question, "Red or green?", which the New Mexico Legislature adopted in 1999.
Is Christmas style red and green mixed together?
They aren't, at least not in any restaurant that would use the word. The two sauces are served next to each other so you can taste them separately, usually with a visible line down the middle of the plate. A pre-mixed red and green chile in one jar is a different and very good thing, and in New Mexico that one goes by Harvest Blend or X-Mas.
What is the difference between red and green chile?
They're the same pod picked at two different ages. Green is harvested at the mature green stage, and red is the identical pod left on the plant to ripen for roughly another month and a half. Green tastes brighter and more vegetal, and red tastes sweeter and earthier because it picks up sugar as it ripens.
Is red chile hotter than green chile?
Ripening doesn't reliably raise the heat. NMSU's cultivar record attributes heat to genetics, weather, growing conditions and fruit age together, so published Scoville figures for New Mexico varieties are averages rather than guarantees. The variety and the heat grade you order tell you far more than the color does.
Which dishes can you order Christmas style?
Anything where the chile is a sauce going on top: enchiladas, smothered burritos, huevos rancheros, chile rellenos, breakfast burritos. It doesn't work where the chile is cooked into the dish, so green chile stew, posole and carne adovada are a one color decision.
Why is it called Christmas?
Because the plate comes out red and green. It's credited to a longtime server at a Santa Fe restaurant, and the earliest printed use anyone has found is from November 1989, well after she started there in 1975. Nothing pins down the actual year.
How much chile do I need to make a pan of enchiladas Christmas style?
About a cup and a half of each color for a 9x13 pan, which feeds six to eight. A 16 oz jar holds about two cups, so one jar of red and one of green covers it with roughly a cup to spare between them.
When should I order chile to arrive before Christmas?
Aim at Wednesday, December 23 as your delivery day and order by the week of December 14. UPS is closed on December 25, and on December 24 it delivers but only collects air shipments arranged by December 18.
Can I get Christmas style frozen in bulk?
Not from us, because we freeze green chile only, in 5 lb bags bundled to 10 and 20 lb orders, so there's no frozen red to pair with it. Christmas style from us is a jar, either the blend or one of each.
How long does green chile keep in the freezer?
It stays safe well past a year at 0°F or below. For the best flavor and texture, NMSU Extension Guide E-311 says to use it inside 12 months. Fresh roasted chile runs on a different clock: cool it below 40°F within two hours and use or freeze it within three days, per NMSU Extension Guide E-324.
The short version
Christmas style means red and green chile on the same plate, side by side rather than stirred together, and it's the standing third answer to New Mexico's official state question. The two sauces taste different because they're the same pod picked about a month and a half apart, and the extra ripening makes red sweeter and earthier rather than hotter. Split the plate on anything sauced, which is enchiladas, smothered burritos and huevos rancheros, and pick one color for anything the chile is cooked into, which is stew, posole and adovada.
To put it on your own table, either grab the Harvest Blend jar and get both in one spoonful, or open a jar of each and plate them properly, which takes a cup and a half of each for a 9x13 pan. If it's a present, order by the week of December 14 and aim at December 23, because the carrier closes on the 25th and stops collecting ground on the 24th. See all the jar flavors, or have a look at everything we pack.