Iowans are infamous for our beloved culinary traditions.

No family gathering is complete without plates overflowing with homemade snacks, dips, salads and desserts, which may be why one Dubuque family went viral in 2022 for their detailed holiday menu.

So I was boarding a flight to San Francisco for a work meeting, and just before the flight took off, my mom sent her annual holiday itinerary, which comprised everything from activities that we'd be doing over the course of the holidays to very, very elaborate meals she'd be making for us.

And I thought it would be funny, as I've done in the past, to do a little tweet sort of saying like, Look at what my mom has put together.

Isn't this cute and fun?

And also a little bit insane.

And I hit send and the plane took off, but it turned out that that tweet had picked up a lot of steam over the course of the six and a half hours I was in the air and I had something like 30,000 notifications on my phone.

And within, I don't know, 12 hours or so, 150,000 people have liked the tweet.

And everyone from classmates, from preschool to former colleagues to national news outlets had reached out wanting to learn more about my mom and her Christmas itinerary and our plans for the holidays that followed.

The El Khatib siblings each live in different states and are only all together for Christmas every other year.

Which is why Janet goes the extra mile to make the holiday season special.

Last year, they spent the week exploring holiday displays, dining out at local restaurants and, of course, eating in at home.

And throughout it all, Khalid was keeping his loyal Twitter followers up to date.

It was the first time that we have been together as a family in a long time.

And although the press and the attention was nice, the actual family time that we spent together was certainly the highlight of last Christmas and of course, the highlight from this virality perspective was my mom being surprised by Hoda from the Today Show, who is one of her long time heroes and favorite news personalities.

Hey, Janet, can you hear me?

Yes, I can.

Okay.

Hey, Janet, we have a surprise for you.

This is not KWWL.

This is...

This is Hoda!

Janet, I think I kind of started screaming, and then I thought I was going to have a heart attack.

And they told me.

Janet, don't have a heart attack.

It was just amazing.

I'm telling you, I had so much fun.

Usually he said, you know, maybe don't read the responses or the comments on Twitter, but people were so positive.

Sometimes I almost felt like crying because people missed their mother or they missed their holidays with family.

And it was just really moving.

And then on the other hand, we had all these people that wanted to come and do our dishes.

They wanted to bring a covered dish, they wanted to be adopted.

They wanted to marry my son.

So it was just fun, really fun.

This is my New England Christmas Village set and it's really important to me.

You walk into the front door, it's the first thing that you see which sort of signifies that it's like a Christmas house.

I said on the Today show, like everyone either has a mom like mine, or they want a mom like mine.

But it truly is like what you see is what you get stepping into the house at the holidays.

Like there are multiple trees.

This is my main Christmas tree.

This one is especially special.

This is when Khalid and I got to meet Hoda out on the plaza, at The Today Show.

We always joke that my sisters had pictures with their husbands and their offspring everywhere.

And then the pictures of me are me and my mom and Hoda.

There are hand sewed stockings behind us.

The food is nonstop and this is not like a new thing.

And I think it is it feels at both very quintessentially Iowa and Midwest.

And I think we have a very close family and that's a lot of people, lot something that a lot of people either relate to or aspire to.

We always look forward to coming home, me and my sisters.

And it's not always easy.

Work can be really stressful.

There are multiple years when we've had to like it's a joke.

It's like crossing the Oregon Trail to get to Iowa.

It's like ten missed flights and driving through a blizzard.

But we know that at the other side we have all of these traditions waiting for us and lots and lots of food.

So on Christmas Day, we have a lot of snacks.

We've actually had to shrink our Christmas dinner menu sometimes because we're so full from the snacks we have.

And these are a few of the things that we've made and our favorite things to make over the years.

So my mom's classic taco dip.

Vegetable pizza.

My sisters usually put together a meat and cheese or charcuterie tray.

And last year, the year of the viral tweet, like I said, a local farmer actually sent us a bunch of cheese from their farm, which we put on the tray, which was lovely.

This is a puff popcorn covered in a sort of caramel glaze and drizzled in light and dark chocolate.

Chex mix in a sort of sweet bourbon, but garlic glaze.

Its very good.

This was a last year edition.

I think.

A butter board.

With honey and pecans.

Spinach, artichoke dip.

We also have Christmas cookies that are always sitting out trays of Christmas cookies.

And let me just remind you that we have a full breakfast.

We have like bacon eggs, French toast, French toast, coffeecake, coffee cake, then this, and then we have a dinner.

My family calls me the Christmas nut, but it's just something I enjoy so much and it brings me so much happiness.

So any more in life, I have found whatever brings you joy.

You just do it.

I always try and make Christmas a special time for our family.

I do think it goes back to my days in New Vienna where I grew up and my mom and dad, I we didn't have a lot, but it was always something special.

We always got the tree from the local tree farm.

My dad, when we were growing up, we would put speakers up in our church tower and he would play Christmas music on Christmas Eve for everybody to listen to.

And my parents were very, very much into the community and the spirit of Christmas.

My house is filled with things from my parents.

I've got ornaments from my mom, I've got her village, I've got her tablecloth, I've got her china.

I'm the one that genetically got most of that love of Christmas in my family.

It's not really surprising that the tweet went viral and that people were excited about it for a couple of days.

But the fact that we're talking about it a year later, that people come up to me on the street sort of recognizing me from that.

When my mom was visiting in New York recently, two people came up to us at restaurants saying, Oh, we love you two.

You're so funny.

And I think that the staying power of this story in that moment is because people are looking for something that is good, that is wholesome, that is relatable, and that, again, is really oriented around family tradition and love more than anything else.