Is it too late to bring back the old days?
I ask because there was a time when people celebrated the holidays with full-throttle eating and drinking.
Now booze is a no-no and everyone seems to have a food issue of some sort, making holiday entertaining about as much fun as cocktails with Rod and Patti Blagojevich.
This year, for example, we're having a dozen family members over for Christmas dinner. Here is a partial list of the "concerns" that have been made known to us:
One person is on a low-sodium diet.
One is a vegetarian.
One is on a gluten-free diet.
One says she might be developing a nut allergy.
And that doesn't include the closeted weight-watchers, who tend to come out at the last minute, inquiring about the fat or carb content of everything just as it's being served.
Oh, this is going to be some dinner, all right.
Faced with this Rainbow Coalition of food issues, all we have to do is whip up 85 different dishes to make sure no one gets grossed out by meat or keels over with a breathing problem or has their metabolism go haywire.
Maybe we should eat at different tables, too.
We could put all the people with food issues at one table, a little dietary gulag where they could talk about their doctors and their conditions and all the foods they can't eat.
The rest of us would sit at another table and shovel ham and turkey and stuffing with pine nuts and crescent rolls with salted butter into our fat faces and talk about the Ravens or the appalling governor of Illinois and his wife.
Or we could talk about the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush and made him duck like one of those bartenders in the old Westerns when a brawl broke out and whiskey bottles were flying.
And here's the thing: These are not old-timers we're talking about, these people with food issues.
These are young and middle-aged people, for the most part, although you'd think you were at Edenwald when they get going about food.
If we make it through the main meal, things will only get worse when it's time for coffee and dessert. Because that's when even people without food issues get squirrelly.
I don't know what it is about coffee, but people always feel compelled to offer their personal coffee histories when it's served.
"I can't drink it, it keeps me up all night," someone always says.
