The Feast of the Seven Fishes, or Festa dei sette pesci, is an Italian-American custom where seven different kinds of seafood are served during a meal, usually on Christmas Eve. Why seven? No one has ever really answered this question for me, though conventional wisdom is that the number relates to the seven sacraments or to the seven days of the week.

It's also part of the longtime Catholic practice of feasting on seafood the night before Christmas.  We found some area restaurants serving variations of the seafood dinner – one eatery is even offering a "Feast of the Seven Fishes sausage" – and not all the meals are on Christmas Eve.