The Holiday Calendar with Celiac: Thanksgiving, Birthdays, and the People Who Love You
The first Thanksgiving after I was diagnosed, our daughter and her husband and their two kids came to our place. Elaine and I were hosting. We made some of the food, they brought some of the food, and the work of figuring out what was going to be safe happened, mostly, on the phone in the week before.
It was not a hard meal. I want to start by saying that. Other people will tell you the first holiday is a disaster but mine wasn't. It was the first time the calendar had asserted itself in my new life, the first scheduled occasion that was not just a Thursday, and I had been quietly afraid of it for weeks beforehand. The actual day was warm and crowded and good. Some dishes we cooked. Some dishes they brought, in containers I had vetted with my daughter on the phone two days earlier. The kids ran around. Elaine and I traded the kitchen back and forth. I had a Thanksgiving plate that looked like a Thanksgiving plate, with a few minor substitutions nobody made a fuss about, and I went to bed full and not sick.
That is the version of the first holiday I want to put on the page first, before any of the harder ones, because the dominant story you read online about celiacs and family is the catastrophe story — the relative who doesn't believe in the disease, the kitchen that gets it wrong, the meal that ends in regret. Those stories happen. They were not, mostly, my story.
What makes the calendar its own project
The earlier chapters were each about a place where the disease meets you. This one is about a time. The Thanksgivings and the Christmases and the birthdays and the anniversaries. The dinner parties at a friend's house. The Sunday lunch at your mother's. The wedding next summer.
These occasions are different from the rest of celiac life in three ways.
The first is that the people feeding you love you. They aren't a server you'll never see again. They are the people who have been feeding you all your life, and who very much want to keep doing it.
The second is that the meal is the occasion. You can skip a road-trip lunch. You can leave a restaurant. You cannot really skip Thanksgiving. Sitting at the table is part of how the day happens.
The third is that these meals come back. The same week, the same people, the same dishes, every year. Whatever you figure out the first time tends to set the pattern for the second and the third.
Four habits
The first habit is the call before the meal. A few days before any meal somebody else is making for me, Elaine or I will call or text the host. The frame I use is collaborative, not interrogative. We're so excited for Saturday. Do you want to walk through the menu with me, in case there's anything I can simplify on the gluten-free side? Almost every host says yes. The conversation that follows tends to be specific and useful — which dish was going to be a problem, whether something can be made with cornstarch instead of flour, whether I should bring my own version of a particular dish. There is nothing harder than trying to renegotiate a holiday meal in the kitchen at 2 p.m. on the day. There is almost nothing easier than working it out by phone the Tuesday before.
The second habit is the offering. I almost always bring a dish to a meal somebody else is hosting. Sometimes a side I know I can eat. Sometimes a gluten-free dessert from a bakery I trust. Sometimes just a loaf of GF bread for me, sliced, in a small container, so that I have something in front of me when the breadbasket goes around the table. The offering reduces, by one dish, what the host has to figure out for me. It also changes the social shape of the meal. I am no longer the person who arrives with a list of things he can't eat. I am the person who arrives with food.
The third habit is the home-base move, same as on the road. I eat something safe before I leave the house. If the meal turns out to be abundant for me, fine, I'm a little less hungry. If it turns out to be small, fine, I'm not arriving ravenous.
The fourth habit is the polite skip. This one took me the longest to learn. There are dishes, at most meals, that I am not going to eat. The dressing. The pie. A casserole with a roux at the bottom. The small skip — thank you, this looks amazing, I'm going to pass on this one — is a tool the book is going to keep handing you. It is not a failure. It is not a snub to the host. The skip lets a meal stay light when it could otherwise go heavy. Pass me the carrots lands different than I can't eat anything on the table.
The conversation about Elaine eating bread
Elaine, in the first weeks after my diagnosis, started avoiding gluten in front of me. We would sit down to dinner at home and she would eat exactly what I was eating, even when there was a perfectly good roll on the counter. At a restaurant, she would order something gluten-free. At a friend's house, she would skip the breadbasket.
She was doing this out of love. She did not want me to feel like the only person at the table missing out.
It made me feel terrible.
It took us a few conversations to land on what was going on, and the answer surprised me. Watching her abstain, when she did not need to abstain, was harder for me than watching her eat normally. The abstention reminded me, every meal, that my disease had taken something from her too. Her eating normally reminded me that the world was still the world, and that the people I loved were still doing the things they had always done, and that being a celiac did not mean everyone around me has to be a celiac.
The version that worked for us, the version we have run on for almost two years now, is that she eats whatever she wants, anywhere, with no reference to what I am eating. She has a sandwich at lunch. She gets a pasta when we are out. She buys a baguette and eats half of it on the cutting board while making dinner. None of this hurts me in any way. We share a kitchen, we share a marriage, but we do not share a digestive tract, and asking her to behave as if we did was a quiet form of asking her to be sick along with me.
Almost every newly-diagnosed celiac I have talked to has had a version of the same conversation, and most of us did not know we were going to have to have it. The people who love you may try to disappear gluten from their own lives in solidarity with you. Tell them not to. The kindness they think they are offering, the visible solidarity, is not the kindness you need. The kindness you need is for the rest of the table to eat normally, and for them to handle the cross-contamination questions when they are cooking for you. Two different protocols, two different occasions. Don't mix them up.
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