Celebrations

For most major holiday's in my family meat is traditionally the centerpiece food but the side dishes have become to be more important as many of my cousins have become vegetarian in the past few years. What we used to do was have a big spread of all the foods we would eat at someone's kitchen or preparation table and then everyone would walk through and grab what they wanted. The hosting family would provide and make the majority of the food and would delegate what others would bring. Now that we have some vegetarians though the family nearly requires them to make the majority of their dishes and to bring them to the events. Kind of like if you want to eat differently that's fine but you need to do a large portion of the providing and cooking. And my family is pretty into cooking so my cousins have taken well to this. The meal is "good" because everyone is together making it a real meal. It's also good for us meat eaters as we usually have a hearty dish prepared that showcases someones cooking prowess (which is an added benefit/fun part in our family).

The family from Great Britain stuck out to me for a couple reasons; maybe they reminded me of my family or of a family I knew. The fact that they were celebrating their kids 14th birthday in a Pub was really cool though. Trying to think back, I didn't have very many birthday parties, but when I did they were usually at my house or a restaurant. It's not common to bring your own cake and toppings to a restaurant/pub/bar in the states at all but I think it's interesting that they can and do. I also like the similarity of how much their family dislikes grocery shopping and that if the husband goes shopping a lot of weird stuff comes back. The same thing happens in my family! With the family from east of Beijing I liked that they focused on meat at big meals or holidays - similar to what we do but in the mean time they don't eat very much meat at all during their average meals which is not the same here. I think I'd like the idea of meat more or it would be less scary to me if it was only eaten at special occasions. It would definitely help.