I’ve always spent Christmas with my mum’s family, mostly because my parents only live a couple of blocks from my maternal grandfather and step-grandmother’s house. It’s a family of thin Ukrainian Mennonites (excepting me, my dad, and my sister), and, lordy, is there ever FOOD. There’s extra gravy, heavenly squash soup, and traditional sour cabbage rolls that are slow-cooked for several hours in a pound of butter. And I’ve never even noticed anyone give me, my sister, or my father a sidelong glance for eating, probably because they’re too busy concentrating on their own plates. ;)

One diet tip that always seems to crop up in magazine holiday eating guides is to watch what the thin people are eating, and eat the way they do. My thin relatives all tend to eat to their heart’s content through all five courses of dinner, and then to take leftovers home for midnight snacking. The idea behind the diet tip, I guess, is that thin people are naturally doing *something right* that fatties need to learn. But the reality, at least in my family, is that cabbage rolls only come around a couple times a year, and OMG DELICIOUS.

I also bought some smokin’ bright colored tops *in my correct size* to wear so that I can be sure everyone gets to see me in all my hot pink glory (ooh, that sounded dirty LOL).

Her crazy, obsessive, constant monitoring and cataloguing how many calories and grams of fat every single item contains became much more noticeable to me as I’ve put on some weight recently; now it all feels like a personal attack though she’s been like this forever. The best part is, half the time she’s literally reading aloud the calorie content of cookies or something, and the other half she’s making us all caramels and fudge as gifts! Makes a lot of sense.

Here’s the weirdest fucking thing: we ate dinner at her house one night and she literally gave the men LARGER BOWLS than the women. I mean, she was serving soup as a main course, and it was obviously quite healthy and low in fat. And even though there were dozens of bowls of all sizes, she instructed me to get down a certain size for the men and a certain size for the women, and to only give the women two ladles of soup vs. three for the men. And this includes men who are several inches shorter and at least 20 pounds lighter than me! I thought she’d clearly gone round the bend.

And you’ll be happy to know that three ladles of soup fit in that smaller bowl juuuust fine.

There was tons of diet talk, however, of course, from all sides. My SIL again talked about how she was going to go to the gym more often and just generally talking down about her beautiful self, encouraging other people to then weigh in about their own diet strategies. I finally could take no more when my husband’s aunt (who incidentally has looked the same for about fourteen years, now) said something for the nth time about how she hadn’t eaten any carbs that day so could have a cookie but she wouldn’t be eating anything else for the rest of the day. I said, rather loudly, “Good lord! Can people give talking about their diets a rest, already? Do it, don’t do it, whatever, just own it and stop obsessing over it!” I’m probably the poor deluded fat girl for it, but you know what? I’m not obsessing over other peoples’ views on my personal body image. It rocked.

Happy holidays!

And that pie sounds marvelous. I’ve saved the recipe and will have to try it sometime.

I realize the point of this post was to anticipate what was going to happen over Christmas, but I didn’t read it until now, so I’ll describe what did happen over Christmas. Basically I’m 32 years old and only one year of my life did I ever not eat myself sick over Thanksgiving and Christmas. Unfortunately, this was not that year. I wish I’d read this post beforehand to ground myself a little, because I love everything in it. At the moment, however, I hate myself for eating like that and am pretty disgruntled about the whole thing. It’s like half self-punishment (“you want too many cookies, you pig? I’ll show you too many cookies!”) and half some chemical situation where once I eat too much one day, I can’t keep myself from doing it the next day too.

At the same time, however, I know the best way to not continue feeling like crap is to let it go and tell myself that even if there were way too many of them consumed, they were just cookies and will make their way out of my system soon, and I’ll feel better if I eat in a more average, healthy way in the coming days, so long-term it’s nothing to stress about.

And more than that, the problem is not cookies anyway (I’m insane about Christmas and love decorating, shopping, listening to xmas music, and most importantly baking tons of stuff that I’m told my husband’s coworkers actually look forward to receiving, but despite this my brain has been whispering that maybe the answer is not to “have that stuff in the house” next year)–or candy, or potatoes, or Chex mix. The problem is that I don’t trust myself around food 360 days a year, so I overeat on those 5 “free” days (and end up doing so on plenty of the other 360 days too, for that matter). Clearly this is not working for me.

So yeah, Christmas-obsessed me is kind of bummed with how the holiday turned out this year. But never mind, maybe 2009 is the year I’ll finally develop some semblance of a normal relationship with food.