# The Holiday Calendar with Celiac: Thanksgiving, Birthdays, and the People Who Love You By Gregory Wilson · Excerpt from Chapter 7 of *Celiac vs Me* 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. 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. 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. I had a Thanksgiving plate that looked like a Thanksgiving plate, with a few minor substitutions nobody made a fuss about. That is the version of the first holiday I want to put on the page first, because the dominant story you read online about celiacs and family is the catastrophe story. 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*. These occasions are different from the rest of celiac life in three ways. The first is that **the people feeding you love you**. They are the people who have been feeding you all your life. The second is that **the meal is the occasion**. You can skip a road-trip lunch. You cannot really skip Thanksgiving. The third is that **these meals come back**. Whatever you figure out the first time tends to set the pattern for the second and third. ## Four habits **The call before the meal.** A few days before any meal somebody else is making for me, I'll call or text the host. The frame is collaborative, not interrogative. *We're so excited for Saturday. Do you want to walk through the menu with me?* There is nothing harder than renegotiating 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 offering.** I almost always bring a dish. Sometimes a side I know I can eat. Sometimes just a loaf of GF bread for me, sliced, in a small container. The offering 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 home-base move.** Eat something safe before you leave the house. **The polite skip.** *Thank you, this looks amazing, I'm going to pass on this one.* It is not a failure. *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. She was doing it out of love. It made me feel terrible. 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 that my disease had taken something from her too. Her eating normally reminded me that the world was still the world. The version that worked for us is that she eats whatever she wants, anywhere, with no reference to what I am eating. 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. The people who love you may try to disappear gluten from their own lives in solidarity. Tell them not to. 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. --- This is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of Celiac vs Me. The full chapter also covers our daughter and son-in-law's careful Pittsburgh visit and the gift of having a city pre-vetted on your behalf, the smaller occasions (birthdays, dinner parties, weddings, funerals) and the gentle email-the-couple-three-weeks-out script for weddings, the recurring meal that quietly improves between the first and the fortieth, and the small grief that lands at year-one even when the meal goes well — and how the second and third years are markedly easier. - [Paperback](https://a.co/d/0ci9KEzr) - [Kindle Edition](https://a.co/d/0dqv86CH) ## Related chapters - [The Day You Get the Celiac Diagnosis](https://celiacvsme.com/the-diagnosis/) - [The First Weeks of Celiac Life: Rebuilding Your Kitchen](https://celiacvsme.com/the-first-weeks/) - [Telling People About Your Celiac Diagnosis](https://celiacvsme.com/telling-people/) - [Reading Gluten-Free Labels: Certifications, Ingredients, and Hidden Gluten](https://celiacvsme.com/the-aisles/) - [Eating Out with Celiac: Trust Signals, Dignity Signals, and the Bridgeport Ribeye](https://celiacvsme.com/the-table/) - [Celiac Travel: Road Trips, Hotels, and the Parking Lot Moment](https://celiacvsme.com/the-road/) - [The Body Underneath: Bloodwork, Healing, and the Real Goal](https://celiacvsme.com/the-body-underneath/)