Vegan Xmas

This has been my first good Christmas in Colorado and my first really good Christmas in years, maybe decades. 

I spent Christmas Eve with my best running buddy and his family. He is a truly good friend and his family (wife, daughter and mother-in-law) have become somewhat extended family to me, too, or I have been sort of “adopted” by them. It was nice to hang out with my running buddy whom I hadn’t seen in a couple months and who had just had surgery the day prior: it was nice to catch up and also special to be there for him — the friend who drove me to my salpingectomy a year ago — as he dealt with his own post-surgery now. It was a lovely evening that turned a difficult day for me full of grief into joyful hours that filled my heart deeply. I felt at home. It felt like family, almost like my own. To a certain extent, it’s healing to be around healthy, functional families like this and to be, at least on the periphery, a part of them. And part of being part of them is the vegan meals they cook for me whenever I visit: none of them are vegan or have any dietary restrictions or allergies, but they always go out of their way to pull up new recipes and cook delicious vegan meals every time I visit. To me, that is an act of love: it’s one of their ways of showing me they accept and welcome me just as I am, and want to make me feel comfortable.* 

Christmas Day dinner was another fully vegan meal cooked for me by totally non-vegan people who, apart from one, were mere acquaintances — at least until two days ago. 

About six months ago, I connected with another climber on political issues and we quickly became friends: he’s my most recent climbing buddy, another of my cis-het guy friends. 

I had spent Thanksgiving dinner with him and a group of friends of his who were total strangers to me; at that dinner, there was nothing vegan except for the food I brought myself. Apart from my new climbing buddy & I, at that Thanksgiving dinner there were two other guys who are very close friends of my buddy’s and with whom I also connected easily. I ended up spending Christmas dinner with these three guys last night and it was truly lovely. It was just us four guys, two straight, two openly queer; four climbers; four very progressive, non-normative or anticonformist people; four persons with STEM backgrounds, at least three of whom are neurodivergent. And all of us without a “family” to go back to for Christmas. So we had our own “vegan Christmas feast” together, filled with lively political conversations, personal story-telling, connection, and movie-watching. Once again, I felt very easily, spontaneously accepted: these are “my people”. But maybe the thing that touched me the most was when, towards the end, the one straight guy who was hosting & mostly in charge of the cooking and who hadn’t really known me until last night, said to me honestly: “At first I was a little cranky about having to have a vegan meal but then I realized that was silly and I’m really glad we did!” 

I hadn’t expected the whole meal to be vegan. When they invited me for Christmas Day dinner, I said clearly that I could bring vegan food and they could prepare whatever they liked. So the fact that they intentionally changed up their recipes to accomodate my dietary preferences, to include me, felt precious to me. Once again, an inclusive gesture: a simple gesture that can mean a lot. And I also, or maybe even more, appreciated that guy’s honesty in saying that at first he had felt cranky about it: that makes me feel I can trust him, we can be in disagreement and work through it and find common ground. 

In many ways, last night didn’t feel like Christmas at all, but in a good way: it didn’t feel like the normative, conformist, commercialized Christmas that our capitalistic (& Christian) society forces upon us. There was no forced, uncomfortable “family” gathering. No Christmas tree, other than a funny small fern on a table with a huge red ball on the very top of it that made it bend over double and look hilarious. There was no mountain of unrequested gifts (another nightmare of my childhood and youth). But there were those things that are probably the greatest gifts and the truest aspects of “Christmas spirit”: the acceptance of differences; a warm and welcoming atmosphere; camaraderie; being there for other people who didn’t have a “place to be” on this forced holiday. In other words, love.

_{*{NOTE: many of my close friends prepare vegan meals for me; I think the importance of this gesture to me stems also from the fact that food & dietary preferences were among the many things for which my family of origin and my longest term ex-partner made me feel weird or wrong and did not accomodate or accept about me.}}