Love Feast

November really marks the start of the "food" holidays for me. They have taken on a new dimension since the pandemic forced everyone to spend more time on their own. In our case, it meant we stayed away from others together. If one of us stayed focused and careful it was bound to keep the other one safe. Since we both, just due to age, are in the high-risk category, we maintained a very high regard for staying out of crowded situations and always washing up and wearing a mask. We didn't get shitty with others who felt different. We just stepped away and relied on our own good judgement. Oh, and we stopped watching numbers. If you stay careful, they just don't seem to carry the impact that the fear mongers and those paid to make a tragedy into a headline thrive on. But I digress. My amazing wife decided to use the time we had to stay away from each other to get healthier. She began a walking program that shamed me into getting off my ass and walking as best I could. The sum total for me anyway is I am now 48 pounds lighter and I have dropped two clothing sizes. Now the trimer me has caused some people to worry but I can assure you that right along with the new exercise program came the Love Feast. What is the Love Feast? It is food prepared with the idea of trying to incorporate only useable calories in a healthy and tasty way. I started getting some amazing food which in turn made me look for amazing food and all of it designed to deal with my prediabetic state and the taste of the product. We can all afford to eat less meat and yes, a tasteless chicken breast is meat. But something else entered the picture. I began to love the food that I was being handed. This stuff isn’t quick. The wild blueberry chia Pudding on the top has to sit in the fridge overnight to get all lovely. The wholewheat blueberry lavender scones take a bit of tender love to make. You don't just twist the package and plop them on the foil. The vegetarian chili on the last page made with sweet potatoes of all things to give it texture was incredibly tasty but it didn't come together in ten minutes. Now lest you think that I was just the recipient, when you eat these love feasts, you have a tendency to start looking around to make your own. You begin to hang out on webpages and watch videos that include natural ingredients combined with technique from the masters. You put on that music you have been wanting time to listen to and yes, you may even find yourself dancing in the kitchen. There was a whole lot of dancing at the love feast. Food made for you as an expression of love and respect rather than as an obligation is an amazing substance. It's like sex. Slow it down to enjoy it longer. Now come the holidays that are really focused on the "together" part. Thanksgiving and Christmas may mean different things to different people but almost everyone associates them with FOOD and FOOD SHARED. I have already heard people talk about how they are going to try to handle the "holiday parties" when each could be the source of personal tragedy. Depending on the progress of the disease as offset by the progress toward a vaccine, we will be skipping most of the holiday parties although, admittedly we get fewer invitations than we used to. We will explain as best we can that we are still committed to being here Christmas 2021 and thus if the crowd is piled into a space that is too crowded or we suspect that too many of our mask-less friends will be there, we will be politely declining. We will find ways to visit with the family that we can. If they are otherwise engaged, we will find an exciting new place to be to cook a love feast for each other to celebrate the fact that we are still here. Some of our favorites aren't and we will lift a glass to them and hope they will realize we would have loved to serve them.