Do you fill up your shopping carts with food for Christmas?

I was standing in a Mega Image supermarket looking confused at my shopping cart and wondering how did it happen that I went in for some tomatoes and yoghurt and came out with a huge cart filled with food.
It was like the apocalypse was coming and I had to have supplies.
And I wasn’t alone in believing this. I looked around: everybody was caught in the Collective Christmas Trance.
We know it well: it’s that special time of the year when we feel like we still live in Communism and we never find food anywhere anymore.

That’s when I realized how unnatural is this dysfunctional relationship with food which afflicts us all before the holidays. How much we cook and how much we eat. Basically, the only thing we do all day long is give our bodies an excess of food which they don’t need and for which they have no use.

And I realized that I have no other model. Because in my family, and in many other thousands of Romanian families, it always happens like this, following the same recipe:
Step 1: Buy lots and lots of food. A lot. A little more…
Step 2: Cook for two whole armies of people.
Step 3: Complain about how much you had to cook.
Step 4: Eat for three days in a row without stopping.
Step 5: Complain about how much you are eating, while you eat.
Step 6: Go visit people, bringing them food from your own house and eating some more in theirs.
Step 7: Promise yourself that, come January 1st, you’ll stop eating.

Therefore, I want to make this article into a “Guide for Holiday Eating in the 21st Century”.

1. Realize that there is no need for us to keep following the transgenerational patterns from our grandparents, who really didn’t have food and had to queue for meat and milk.
2. When you go shopping, go with a list and don’t buy what you don’t need. Tell yourself that you will find in the stores everything you need, all the time, just as you’ve always done after the Revolution.
3. Learn to say No. If you feel at any time that your stomach is full and you’ve eaten enough, it’s ok to stop. The food will still be there an hour later. I know that it seems as if we can’t buy cozonac during the rest of the ear, but I solemnly swear, based on my own experience, that nowadays it can be found in the stores 365 days a year.
4. If your family/friends/hosts insist that you eat “just a little more”, don’t be fooled. As we well know, for us Romanians “just a little more” means two additional main courses and three kinds of desert. Everybody will survive if you refuse, and will like you just as much afterwards.
5. Ask yourself if by eating and drinking excessively you are showing love to your body. Imagine that your body is a very young child. Would you force-feed that child to excess when they clearly said that they are no longer hungry?
6. Eat only when hungry. I know that during the holidays this concept of “physical hunger” becomes alien… but imagine how would it be if you didn’t have to overeat, to experience stomach aches, to get upset about putting on weight.
7. Remember that you are not powerless in front of food. The decision is in your hands.

And the most important thing:
Getting together for holiday meals is a pretext for being together with our loved ones for the holidays. A pretext for the joy of laughing, playing, remembering adventures together. The social connection is what really fills us up and satisfies us, not the food.