Holidays with a special diet can be tricky, stressful, and even disappointing. Discover some ways to make the situation easier! Small actions can minimize the impact of changes involved in special diets, so your holiday celebrations with food allergies remain joyful, fun, and even manageable.
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Holidays with a special diet can be shocking. And frustrating. Especially at the beginning! Food is typically a big part of celebrating, at least for most people.
And rightly so! Who doesn’t love special meals, treats, and drinks? Maybe you have a special family recipe, an especially seasonal dish, or just a favorite that you indulge in only during a particular holiday. Food plays a role in the traditions that distinguish our family culture, our larger culture, and the rhythms of life that we treasure from year to year.
Naturally, when a special diet becomes necessary for whatever reason, those special, seasonal foods might suddenly be off limits. You may adjust successfully in your daily life only to be blindsided by the holidays with a special diet and the additional, and possibly more sentimental, adjustments you need to make.
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Holidays with a Special Diet
There are not many areas (maybe none, come the think of it), where I consider myself an expert. I know a bunch of things, and have a variety of skills, like the rest of humanity, but I am not any sort of expert at any of them. More a “jack of a few trades but master of none.”
One thing I have a good bit of experience at doing, though, is adjusting to new dietary restrictions. For more than 20 years, through food allergy, celiac disease, and too many temporary reasons to eat in certain ways to remember, our family has had many reasons to makes shifts in our diet.
Usually, it has been a doctor or other professional telling us we needed to make a change. Sometimes it was a life-preserving necessity, or a short-term need or experiment. Other times, one of us realized a particular food wasn’t working out well and avoided it, either for a short time or permanently.
Then there was the GAPS diet. That was recommended by a professional, but it was strictly voluntary. It had some effects, which I have written about here.
We have also voluntarily improved our diet over the years away from something pretty close to the Standard American Diet (SAD turns out to be a pretty accurate acronym). While the changes have been incremental, they have accumulated and shifted our habits.
So, I have adjusted many times to many dietary habits, sometimes just for a little while, and other times permanently. There are ways to handle it, and I am going to share some of what I have learned. Even if I am not an expert! Practice helps.
What hope is there for the holidays with a special diet?
Lots of hope! There are many things you can still do, and a few changes to make. You can also train yourself to think a little differently and still enjoy festive holidays with a special diet, all while staying healthy. Let’s start with the food, which is, after all, the big sticking point.
Take stock of what you would normally serve
If all the old favorites you can’t have this year are popping to mind, save those for later. First, figure out what you can still eat! Actually, that is the first thing I suggest to anyone floundering in the overwhelm of making dietary changes– list your favorites that you can keep just the way they are. There may be more than you fear!
For example, if you typically like roasted turkey, can you still do that? Maybe your grandmother’s cranberry sauce still works. Or the mulled cider you loved growing up is just fine! Once you determine what you can keep, you have a starting point.
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Next, consider simple tweaks
You may notice, as you list the old standbys that require no changes, that a few favorites are close to workable. But not quite. Can you make easy changes to those?
Perhaps you love the turkey, but can’t baste it with butter anymore. Well, maybe that could be fixed by using duck fat, olive oil, or something else. The rest of the recipe can stay the same. Easy!
Or your cranberry sauce with sugar can’t happen, but could you use something else? Depending on your reason for avoiding the sugar, could you use honey, other fruit, or a sugar substitute?
Or that scrumptious breakfast quiche with a gluten-containing crust? You could make or buy a crust, or do what I do. Leave out the crust! Just grease the dish and pour the egg mixture in. Easy! Maybe the change can be small.
Decide which old favorites to overhaul
Maybe your favorite Christmas cookie can’t be easily tweaked. Cookies are kind of hard for a lot of special diets, since they are made mostly of ingredients that cause problems– gluten, grains, sugar, dairy, eggs, nuts…
In that situation, maybe you can make a couple of changes and get the cookie to more or less work. For example, if replacing the butter with another fat, the eggs with one of many egg replacers, or the flour with a gluten free flour blend salvages the recipe, do that.
If substitutions don’t work, or you can’t figure out what to try, it might be quicker to look for a similar recipe that does fit your needs. A sugar cookie or gingerbread recipe that is already suited to your dietary restrictions might work out fine. And you could still make the same shapes or decorate them in a way that is familiar.
I wouldn’t recommend doing this on Christmas Eve! Try some recipes out early. Some will probably fail. Failure is part of learning, and change requires learning. Give yourself margin to fail and try again! And if your first holidays with a special diet include only one type of cookie, enjoy that type of cookie! Maybe you can add something next year.
Finally, discover new favorites!
As happy and comforting as old favorites can be, add a new item (or a few) to your holiday repertoire! If cookies are totally out, maybe a fruit crisp (like this apple crisp, or this pear crisp, or even this pear raspberry crisp) or frozen treat (check out these!) better. A totally different cookie that suits your needs but isn’t (yet) a tradition could make its debut. Be adventurous!
In our family, a cookie that we tried one year stuck. Every year when I ask what Christmas cookies my family wants, this one is the top contender! We end up making it more than once through the Christmas season, but it wasn’t originally part of our family tradition.
What happened was that we watched Why Do We Call it Christmas?, which I heartily recommend to any family with children celebrating Christmas. We watched it every year for a long time. In the show, Sunday School Lady makes pepparkakor, then has to make them again at the end. (Pepparkakor is a Swedish Christmas cookie– with various spellings– similar to gingerbread, but with cardamom.)
One of the kids asked if we could make pepparkakor. As it happened, I had an untried recipe in an allergy cookbook. Well, that was easy. And it was a serious hit! We all love it, and it isn’t even hard to make.
Not only that, but when Grandpa tried it one year, he said his family used to make something like it when he was a boy. Funny how a flavor can bring back an old memory! His Swedish grandmother apparently made it, but the recipe faded out of the family. Until it dropped back in, but in allergy friendly form.
So new favorites can develop, and might even have their own special-ness your family will cherish.
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Holidays with special diets aren’t mainly about food!
While the food is of interest to anyone embarking on a special diet, food is not the only detail to consider. In challenging situations where a person can’t have food at all, other forms of celebration become essential! For the rest of us, too, there are many ways to celebrate!
Consider the people
Whether you are celebrating with family or with friends, time spent together trumps food every time. Sometimes, people (children, especially) have strong feelings about the food. There may be tears! That is OK; let them cry, then redirect attention to the gift of being together.
Even if you eat differently from everyone else, it is good to get together. We have done everything from supplying all our own food at a gathering to showing up and having everything served, from the main meal to the birthday cake, be totally fine for us!
Some people tackle the challenge of cooking for us; they are rare gems. Others aren’t going to do that, and we love them anyway, so we do what is needed to spend time with them.
Assume the responsibility of communication
Extended families and friends will respond differently to your special diet, especially at first. Make sure to talk with them well in advance! You will need to figure out what they are up for, and what you need to do. If you are hosting, the whole thing is simpler.
If you are the guest, you will need to discern what your role should be. Maybe you need to just pack food you can have so there is no question. Or you can contribute the trickier dishes. Sometimes it helps to talk over the recipes they are planning to use; maybe they work fine, or maybe a simple substitution is within their reach.
If cross contamination is an issue for you, you should communicate that clearly and calmly. See how the person responds. If they understand and are eager to accommodate that hassle, great! If not, maybe you take your food along. Nobody want to end up in the ER or worse!
We have been blessed with very understanding family and friends. Sadly, this is not true for everyone. If the loved ones involved don’t understand the situation or won’t accept and work with what you need, you will have a totally different situation to navigate. For more on how to work with these situations, check out this article.
Focus on food-free holiday activities
There are lots of festive things to do that aren’t food or drink! If it is Christmas, consider these activities and add to the list!
- hunt for a Christmas tree together
- decorate the house and the tree
- listen to Christmas music
- attend a concert or other musical event
- play and sing yourselves
- make crafts- ornaments, gifts, decorations, etc.
- go caroling in your neighborhood, a local nursing home, etc.
- watch Christmas movies
- go to services related to Christmas– lessons and carols, Christmas pageants, Christmas Eve, etc.
- find and enjoy Christmas lights displays, live nativity events, etc.
- read great Christmas books, like A Christmas Carol, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, etc.
- make a gingerbread house, gingerbread nativity, gingerbread village…
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Do things that aren’t holiday-specific
Activities around a holiday need not relate directly to the holiday! Think about:
- outdoor activities, like a hike, building a snowman, skiing, ice skating, etc.
- help someone else– either volunteer locally or just help someone who needs it
- see a good movie
- play games
- read or listen to a good book
- tackle projects you don’t have time for otherwise
Remember what the holiday is for
The very best way to enjoy holidays on a special diet is to devote your attention to the reason we celebrate!
We work out the food details so we can spend time with friends and family, because the people matter more to us than the food does.
Similarly, the point of the holiday is never about the food. The food is extra!
New Year’s is about starting a brand new year. (Overrated, in my opinion…)
Valentine’s Day celebrates love, and has a historical basis. Learn about that!
St. Patrick’s Day is the day we are all Irish for a few hours, and it also has a history.
Easter celebrates Jesus rising from the dead, conquering sin and death, so we could be reconciled to God and live forever with Him!
The Fourth of July, for Americans, is about the founding of our country which, though never perfect, is a unique story that is a part of who we are. Many countries celebrate a particular national day.
Birthdays recognize the value and blessing of the person born that day.
Thanksgiving come the closest to being about food– but it isn’t about the food! The food is one of many blessings we thank God for on Thanksgiving in the Unites States. Many cultures have similar observances.
And Christmas is when we celebrate the baby God sent to save us when we couldn’t save ourselves. Think about God’s Son and Easter during the Christmas holidays, and don’t stress about the food!
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Great article, Rachel! Love Katharine
Thank you!