Traditional Holiday Glazed Maple & Brown Sugar Ham

Grandma’s Traditional Holiday Glazed Maple & Brown Sugar Ham is a perfect centerpiece for your holiday table. This ham is easy to put together and only has 5 ingredients!

When it comes to holidays, I’m a traditionalist. I will never have a hot pink tree. I will never leave Santa tofu bars and soy milk, and I will never serve fish for Christmas dinner.Yes, when it comes to the holidays, I like it just the way it has always been.

A huge part of the way it has always been is the food. If you asked anyone in my family what their favorite part of Christmases past (and Thanksgiving and Easter) has been and I would be willing to bet that my Grandma’s Traditional Holiday Glazed Maple & Brown Sugar Ham would be the first thing out of their mouth ( probably followed up by my other grandmother’s coconut cake but that’s another blog post).

A recipe lost, then found again

My grandmother was a difficult woman to live with but when it came to the holidays she always did it right. The house was always decorated, there were always tons of cookies and cakes and jellies around, but the Pièce de résistance was the ham.

It was the first thing you put on your plate, the first thing you put in your mouth and it was the first thing to be gone from the table. It was the most looked forward to dish of the year.

The Christmas after she passed away there was a very noticeable void at the dinner table. She had left us all, and and being true to the difficult woman that she was, she took the ham recipe with her. For several years after that the ham at Christmas fell short, obviously not the ham we all desperately wanted.


I had inherited my grandmother’s recipe box. It is a pink and blue crosstiched box with a plethora of hand-written index cards and magazine clippings. One day, a few years ago, near the holidays, I was flipping through and came across a magazine clipping for a ham.

It was the only ham recipe in the whole box (which seemed odd because there was at least 6 different clippings for meatballs and Salisbury steak). I figured this must be it, the ham we had all been craving! So for the next few years I made this recipe, and it was close, but not it exactly.

This year though, I made a few changes and I hit the nail square on the head…EUREKA! I had finally figured it out.

What to do with leftover ham?

We make Grandma’s Traditional Holiday Glazed Brown Sugar Ham for any and all holidays; Easter, Christmas, Thanksgiving, St. Paddy’s Day, you name it.

We basically are always looking for an excuse to make it. And when we get tired of eating the sliced ham, or we have gnawed it down to the bone, we make plans to make up a batch of my husband’s Ham and Cabbage Soup.

My son always puts his vote in for my Pineapple Ham Balls, and my daughter just wants us to leave it alone and pack the rest in her lunchbox with some soup (she’s a ham purist). I always put my vote in for a giant pot of ham and white beans. 

Either way, my Grandma’s Traditional Holiday Glazed Maple & Brown Sugar Ham is the gift that keeps on giving.

Holiday Ham sides

If you are making this ham for a holiday meal like Easter of Christmas, make sure to whip up one of these tasty sides to go with it!

• Baked Crab Mac and Cheese
• Deviled Eggs
• Easy Mashed Cauliflower
• From Scratch Green Bean Casserole
• Roasted Broccoli and Brussels Sprouts

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Grandma’s Traditional Maple & Brown Sugar Holiday Ham

Grandma’s Traditional Holiday Glazed Honey & Brown Sugar Ham is a recipe that was nearly lost. It’s only got 5 ingredients, including the ham, but those flavors together make for the best holiday ham you can put on your table.

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Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cook Time: 1 hour

Total Time: 1 hour 15 minutes

Course: dinner, main dish

Cuisine: holiday, southern

Servings: 10 servings

Calories: 2042kcal

Ingredients

• 1 spiral sliced ham
• 1/2 cup fresh orange juice
• 1/2 cup pear nectar you can find this in the alcohol mix section if its not in the juice section of the store
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup maple syrup molasses is good too

Instructions

• Preheat oven to 375. Place ham cut side down in deep baking pan. Mix pear nectar and OJ together and pour over ham. Roast for 30 minutes, basting every 10 minutes with juice.
• Meanwhile mix together syrup and sugar. Pour on top of ham then spread evenly over it. Bake until sugar carmelizes and starts to form a crust, about an hour. Let rest, enjoy!

Notes

Note: Over the years we have moved away from spiral sliced hams for this recipe and have been using the shank end unsliced hams that are usually about half the price of spiral sliced. When we do that, we crosshatch the ham before we bake it. That means we score the outside of the ham with a knife in a diamond pattern. The cuts are usually only about a 1/4 -1/2 inch deep. This helps some of the fat render off the ham and allows the glaze and juice to get down to the meat of the ham.

Nutrition

Calories: 2042kcal | Carbohydrates: 24g | Protein: 172g | Fat: 134g | Saturated Fat: 47g | Cholesterol: 496mg | Sodium: 9501mg | Potassium: 2363mg | Sugar: 23g | Vitamin A: 25IU | Vitamin C: 6.4mg | Calcium: 84mg | Iron: 7.1mg

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