Always Look on the Bright Side of Life...

I have successfully navigated my first major food related holiday.  This 4th of July was my first holiday post-Eosinophilic Esophagitis and food allergy diognoses. I spent the weeks leading up to the 4th obsessing over what to take.  I knew that there would be NOTHING I could eat at my in-laws' house ("I am making hot dogs, hamburgers, potatoes salad, and fruit salad with pecans.  I also made a cake and we have ice cream!" they announced.  I mentally checked off each item, "Um, nope, nope, nope, no, no, nope, no-sirree-Bob, yep, that would be a nope...nada.")  Since we were going to be there for about 12 hours straight, I had to plan well.  I spend several hours at several stores getting everything I needed, and cooked all day Sunday; by noon on Monday, I was fairly certain I had slayed that dragon.

The 4th went off without a hitch.  Admittedly, it is a BEAR making a day's worth of food to take to someone else's shin-dig, but this was always an important holiday for my in-laws, kinda their "thing," so to speak, so I figured it was worth the extra effort.

Admittedly, I have no intention of doing this for all the holidays, Thanksgiving is MINE, dude, my house, my food, MINE.  And Christmas is rather a shared holiday...Christmas Eve is theirs, but Christmas Day is a time for kids to jump from their beds, wake up their parents with a shriek, open presents in a frenzy...only to fall asleep among the litter of paper, half pieced together presents, and empty boxes.  It is NOT a day to haul a bunch of food around from house to house, making the rounds, while other people eat things that suddenly look better than what you brought.

One perk of having a lot of food issues is there is no more battling over who has which holiday where, and didn't so-and-so do Christmas last year?, and what shall I bring?, and when does it start because some other relative wants us to come by there, too?  Shudder.  Nope, no more.  No one wants the responsibility of dealing with cross contamination and allergy accommodation.  So we are the outcasts when it comes to the Three Major Food Holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter).

Heh, heh!  Finally, I got them back.  All the holidays...they are MINE!

See, there IS a bright side to this whole food allergy thing.

I kid! I kid!

Kind of...

And now for something completely different...