The Holiday Eating Ritual: For Those About to Binge, We Salute You
©Christine Olinger first appearing in Ladybug Flights, November 2003

Can you move yet? I'm still waddling just a bit. It's that time of year: the marathon of gluttony that stretches between Thanksgiving and New Year's gapes before us like a gigantic, open mouth. Diets are discarded, consciences ignored, cravings indulged and waistlines abused. Let the binging begin!

I know. We are supposed to feel an impending sense of dread, faint tremors of guilt, and a natural, adult impulse to curtail the behavior that we can, rationally, identify as self destructive. Good luck with that. I'm having cheesecake.

As someone who does not diet, my own sense of dread is minimized. I try to eat responsibly, but I never count calories and refuse to obsess over every little item on my plate. Are the carbs low, the proteins high, the food pyramid err... pyramidded properly? If so, I dig in. And yes, during this holiday stretch I am much more likely to indulge in higher carbs, lower proteins, and lopsided pyramids.

You must keep in mind that I come from a family in which indulging is a sport. Two of my brothers, in fact, often had “come out even” contests over Thanksgiving dinner: neither was allowed to leave the table till his plate was empty and the plate could only be emptied if every forkful of food included even distributions of turkey, gravy, stuffing, potato, cranberry sauce, and veggie. Multiple helpings were inevitable to maintain a balance. Usually there was a breather period between dinner's conclusion and dessert, which was just as obscenely lavish. It's hard to understand how I ended up with a weight issue in my adulthood.

Then again, my life partner Ahmed was in England this past week spending time with his own family. Ahmed does not have weight issues. He's one of those people who has a naturally athletic build and a medically astonishing metabolism. To be fair, he does yoga and thai-chi every day, but he also eats as much, if not more, than anyone else I know. When I spoke to him on the telephone the day before Thanksgiving he was lying in bed trying not to move because any minute jiggle or roll disturbed the basketball-shaped evidence of his over-indulgence, causing a dull ache in his tummy. His family is Kurdish. He, his brother, his sister, and his parents are all very healthy. They do not come from a culture of excess, yet when they gathered to celebrate this much-anticipated reunion food took center stage.

So what is it? It's universal: families gather, families celebrate, families eat. Surely in the earliest days of human civilization, when food was much harder to come by and had to be grown or hunted down personally rather than lugged from Costco to refrigerator in pre-packaged cellophane, lavish meals were a show of appreciation. Food is rare; food is good; we are gathered to celebrate; break out the food. Centuries may have eroded the true nature of the impulse, but the tradition continues.

Besides, all these winter holidays-- Christmas, Michaelmas, Yule, Kwanzah-- all of these are thinly masked expressions of ancient death and rebirth rituals celebrated at the solstice. They are hibernation rites. Snow will soon blanket the world. Spring will be a long time coming. Bulk up, you'll need the fat. It's primal. We may be modern men and women living in an age of food labels and scientific diet-theory, but somewhere underneath it all we're really just fur-wrapped beasts who can't help but dance around the fire when Uncle Tontor brings home a big, fat woolly mammoth for the feast. Nobody ever saw a bird go into the oven and cooed “wow, I bet that's very low in saturated fats with a high protein index.” No, we want to know how many pounds that sucker is and if there's real butter on the skin to make it crisp and golden. You'd think Uncle Tony killed it himself.

I will dispense absolutely no advice or warnings with regard to eating during the coming weeks. Pig out if you want. I know I'll be inhaling the occasional truffle. I'm looking forward to white chocolate raspberry cheesecake (yes, they make such a thing, and yes, it's that good). I've lost a large portion of weight this year (so my doctors tell me, I do not own a scale). While knowing this makes me glad, for I know it means I've been eating better and exercising more without anyone beating me over the head, I also have no intention of attaching any particular sense of victory to my weight loss. Nor shall I wallow in shame when I put on ten pounds between now and January.

The winter here is cold. Spring is a long way off. I will brave the drifts of fallen powder to travel across a great waste called Route 95 and conquer the expanse of parking in the hallowed temple called BJ's Wholesale Club. I will smite the mighty Cheesecake in its lair and returned to the hearth with my bounty. There will be great rejoicing among my clan. Grab a fork... but don't get in my way.