salad and rolls

Family holidays are usually a pretty unenjoyable experience for me. My family takes their dinners seriously. Or at least the men do. They spend countless hours trying to create the perfect cedar plank salmon, or deep fried turkey, or honey roasted ham. Once the food is put out, everyone swarms over the dishes like a swarm of locusts, devouring and destroying anything edible in sight. Once this unholy sight is finished, the air is filled with words of compliment to whoever cooked the main course for the event. These words never come from my mouth.

I'm the only vegetarian in my family. I'm what the books refer to as an "ovo-lacto" vegatarian, which means that the only food I consume that comes from animals is eggs and dairy. No beef. No Pork. No Poultry. No Fish. Being of the vegetarian persuasion, my typical holiday meal consists of a salad, some rolls, and some canned corn that someone threw in for color. I don't complain about this, because it's obviously my own choice, no better is holding a gun to my head and screaming at me to put the turkey leg down, I decided to not eat meat. The part that bothers me, however, is that after ten years of not eating meat, my entire family still thinks its funny to make jokes about it.

"You want extra ham, right?" "Do you want to taste test the salmon? I know how much you like it." A very small sample of what my family finds humorous. The first year or two, I just shrugged it off and chalked it up to ignorance. After that, it's made holidays the least favorite time of year for me. This year, I decided that I'm done with family gatherings that focus on food. From now on, my new holiday tradition is to stay home and cook for myself.