Ah, the winter holiday season! There’s a crisp snap in the air, homes are filled with the aromas of peppermint and ginger, the malls are potentially lethal, a very few people recall that there are holidays other than Christmas being celebrated, and the world is awash in body shame.

I can’t turn on my computer or television without being assaulted by messages that I’m going to gain gigantic amounts of weight this winter if I don’t stop being so greedy at the same table I’m supposed to fill with homemade goodies until the legs give out. Every ladymag in the universe has a picture of the perfect pie, cake, or souffle I’m supposed to make, alongside a reminder that gaining a single ounce from eating it means I will die well before my time, alone and unmourned as Scrooge in the vision shown him of his potential future. Every year some fanatic out there starts a campaign to make Santa skinny so that he can use his role model status to shame those who carry more meat on their bones.

But you know what? We can opt out of the insanity. We can spend this special time of year failing to hate ourselves. We don’t need to create the false dichotomy of too much food  that we are not allowed to eat. You know what we can do?

We can take care of ourselves.

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Remember, everyone: there’s still time to change your plans.

I’m talking about having Thanksgiving with your family.

No, I’m definitely not saying that Thanksgiving with your family is a horrible idea. I don’t know your family. A family Thanksgiving may be just what you need to make you feel fantastic and confident and joyful for the rest of the year… I’m just saying not all families are created equal. And not all families are healthy for us to interact with during the holidays.

If your family feels no meal is complete without a side of body shame or the ritual humiliation of the fatty at the table, don’t go. Don’t do this to yourself. Really don’t do this to yourself if you’re expected to cook the feast, but accept that every mouthful will be accompanied with snide remarks about whether you really need the calories.

Nobody deserves to be treated that way. You don’t deserve to be treated that way.

Now if you have already made the plans, bought the turkey, and polished the silver, well, okay, you may have to go through with the dinner as planned. But that doesn’t mean you need to put up with abuse at your own table. Here are a few tips to help you get through the ordeal, and a couple to break the cycle afterwards.

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There were some fabulous comments to my article last week about Thanksgiving dishes we love and loathe. It’s a meal most people have wildly strong opinions about, in large part because of our histories with the holiday.

So I’m not going to even attempt to tell you what you have to have on your table or what you must needs avoid for fear of winding up in Food Hell. Where one person adores green bean casserole, another hates it. Where one can only eat homemade stuffing straight from the bird, another will only eat Stove Top cooked on, well, the stove top. Where one thinks sweet potatoes are naked sans miniature marshmallows, another holds any sweetening of sweet potatoes as an abomination. Where one wants a Jell-o mold, another longs for green salad. Pitched battles can be fought over pumpkin pie vs pecan.

In the end, I’m not too exercised about which dishes make it Thanksgiving for you and which you hold in contempt. I’m curious, but not worried too much about your individual decisions.

I do, however, have a few tips if you’re floundering about wondering what to cook for this Important Meal.

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Hello, my darlings! Did you miss me? I know I did! But I’m back now, with all kinds of lovely things to talk about… and a couple not so lovely, but let’s leave those for next week, shall we? Right now I want to talk about having a good time and trying things.

This is my very good friend, Kat, and her horse, Joe, participating in a recent gymkhana.

They came in last place, alas. Still, considering that Kat hadn’t been on a horse in two years and had only just gotten Joe, she feels that getting through the entire course was plenty of win. And, in point of fact, it is. Rising in the ranks can come later.

Sometimes the most important thing isn’t whether we competed well or got precisely the result we would wish for on a star, but the fact that we got up and did something we don’t normally do.

I did a couple of those sorts of things on my recent vacation. I tried my hand for the very first time at making lemon curd. Why in the name of all that’s delicious did I put this off for so long??? I am now officially a curd-making fool! I’m eager to play with various citrus fruits, adding different flavorings, and making bigger batches.

Of course, trying out a new dish (especially a pastry-related one) isn’t that huge a risk for me. I have a natural affinity for the kitchen, and if I fail… it’s a few wasted ingredients and an hour or two, not the end of the world.

But I did do something much scarier for me. As some of you are aware, Mr. Twistie is a musician. He gigs with a couple bands in addition to the one he heads and writes for. One of these bands had a gig at a KOA campground with a nightclub and docks, and the idea arose that it would be fun if all the guys in the band brought along their wives. I had nothing else on that weekend and our next door neighbor was happy to look in on the cat, so I said sure. That’s not the scary part.

The band was hot, the room was dark, and I have night blindness. When the lights dim, I can’t tell what’s a foot in front of me. It’s the worst inheritance I got from my mother. So on the incredibly rare occasions when I go to clubs, I tend to park myself in a chair and not move for the rest of the night.

After a while of sitting in a room that looked like this to me:

… one of my friends came over with a parrot. Someone had brought a pair to the party and R had one of them on her shoulder. She wanted to introduce me. Well, I reached out and gave the bird a pet, and what did he do? He reached out with his beak, took a firm but gentle grip on my shirt, and hopped straight onto my shoulder! I’d never held a bird before. There was something intoxicating about this creature choosing to come be with me.

And then I did something else I hadn’t done before. I got up into the darkness, made my way onto the dance floor, and danced solo with that parrot on my shoulder. What’s more, I managed to dance around with no visual clues in a sea of seriously drunken people without physical harm to me, any other dancers, or the parrot!

Now that was a chance taken!

Would I do it again? That kind of depends on my mood and the situation. Am I glad I did it once? You bet your sweet bippy, I am!

Sometimes you just have to do something utterly unexpected. It’s how you know you’re still really alive.

There’s nothing wrong with my backside per se.

It has several ardent admirers, but even the intoxicated appreciation of the Toothless Vagrants Local 310 could not hide the sad truth: While I’ve got plenty of boom boom up front, I am noticeably lacking in the posterior pow.

When I was in Mexico not only was I surrounded by Latinas of all shapes and sizes, sporting big, bouncing backsides (many trying to catch the attention of my Hot Latin Boy and giving me the stinkeye when he was clearly not having it), one of the villas up the street had been converted into a plastic surgery recovery house where, according to my neighbor, 8 out of 10 of them were there for butt enhancements.

I reminded myself that as a rule, I do not have body issues and Something Must Be Done before I drove myself insane.

I couldn’t reasonably change how it looked and besides, there was nothing objectively wrong with it.

It’s not that nice perky bubble, but it’s strong, firm and still relatively young.  Sure there’s cellulite but, I’ve had cellulite since the fourth grade. That dimpled ship sailed before glasnost and it’s not coming back. I’ve got bigger fish to fry.

The only thing I could really do is change the way I felt.

In the movie version of this story there would be a montage of hilarious yet endearing moments of me consciously trying to bond with my backside, possibly with a Sonny and Cher soundtrack  but what really went down is this:

I saw Orfeu Negro.

Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus) is a 1959 masterpiece from French director Marcel Camus that sets the Greek tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice in a shanty town outside Rio de Janeiro during the dizzying days before Carnival. It’s a beautiful piece of cinema, but what stuck out –literally and figuratively– were the behinds.

They were aspirational.

The extras were women from the local favela and samba schools and they all walked around with this amazing regal walk, carrying their rumps like royal orbs, especially the older, fatter women and especially while they were dancing.

I needed to learn to samba.

One night, I prevailed upon one of the waiters at the only restaurant in my village to take me to a place in a nearby town that offered the Brazilian export and we went, I in my white dress and he in approximately six gallons of Aspen cologne.

The club was loud and there were chickens in the parking lot.

They did NOT serve gin and tonics.

Gentle reader, I do not think it will surprise you when I say I am not the finest samba dancer in the state of Baja California. Frankly, I wasn’t all that surprised myself. I WAS surprised I was so actively, aggressively bad.

I am a good dancer. The steps looked easy. Surely it couldn’t be that hard.

Ha.

Again, in the movie version I’d go from hapless gabacha to samba queen in the span of a few minutes, thanks to the instructive caresses of my sexy Latin waiter and we’d realize, despite our social and economic differences and his flagrant abuse of drug store fragrance, we were Meant To Be Together.
Meaningful exposition of self.
Jump cut to bedroom scene.
Slow fade to black.

What actually happened was this:

“YOUR BUTT IS IN JAIL!”

“WHAT?”

“YOUR BUTT. IT IS IN JAIL! LET IT GO!!”

“NO I ALREADY HAVE A DRINK!”

“PUSH YOUR BUTT OUT, LOOSE! LOOSE!!”

 ”WHAT??? TEXAS!! I DON’T THINK I’M DOING THIS RIGHT!!”

And then somehow –and honestly I have no idea how– it happened. I found my inner Brazilian butt.

No one was surprised as I when things started shaking ’round the back 40. Maybe I was tired or maybe it was cachaca margaritas, but I started channeling those broad-beamed broads from Orfeu Negro and it felt so good, so strange and wild and not even remotely Episcopalian that I couldn’t help but let those months of ugly self-talk steam out of me with my sweat.

(French theatrical trailer for Orfeu Negro. Seriously. Watch it.)

I was still the worst samba girl in the club, my waiter friend, while admittedly very sexy, still smelled like my first boy/girl dance circa 1992 and no amount of magical thinking is going to give me one of those fantastic Latin backsides, but that’s not the point.

The point is I made friends with my body, with a part of my body I wasn’t –even if was just a very short while– especially fond of.

I didn’t do it through external praise or by changing what it fundamentally (ha) was. I did it by finding a way to make “LOOK WHAT I CAN DO!” trump “Look what I don’t have!” and if I can do it, you can do it; and if you can do it, why don’t we all start right now?

Now I’m going to watch Orfeu Negro again…the big samba scene is coming up and frankly I still need a few pointers.

Next time I don’t want to scare the chickens.

PSSST: Do you follow @missplumcake on Twitter? If not, today might be a good day to start. I’m answering readers’ questions all day. Personal, professional, just keep it (moderately) clean! –ed.

… do all those things that are frowned upon. You know, indulge yourself.

Whether it’s a bubble bath, another shot of espresso, a pair of wicked heels your calf muscles will regret loudly in the morning, an evening of Lifetime movies and Cherry Garcia, a gloriously fudgey brownie, a bottle of good wine that’s just a little bit too expensive, or the joy of really speaking your mind to someone without considering the consequences, there are things in life that really need doing.

Of course you can’t do all of them, and you can’t do them all the time. That’s why they’re indulgences and not physical necessities. Food, water, air, shelter, caffeine… these are basic necessities. Without them we literally cannot live for long. Okay, maybe caffeine is an exaggeration, but only a tiny one.

But indulgences are the things that make life feel really, really good. Any one of them  may be completely extraneous to the business of staying alive, but without them we don’t feel all that much like keeping on keeping on. That’s why along with the Red Cross bringing food and medical aid to disaster victims, there are also organizations that provide the children in those disasters with stuffed animals and groups that bring handmade quilts to people who are suffering dread long-term illnesses in hospitals. Sure, the quilts and the Teddy bears aren’t strictly needed. They just make surviving worth it.

So remember to indulge yourself in the rough times. Heck, even in the not-so-rough times, it doesn’t hurt to say yes to something every twice in a while just because it makes you smile.

Speaking of which, my friends, I’m off on a month of vacation from blogging. It’s been a couple years since I took more than a few days off, and I’m not quite sure what I’ll be doing with myself. It is, however, time to get in touch with a few things inside me.

Fear not, though. Come September, I’ll be back and tilting at windmills seven days a week. That’s kind of my indulgence. I just have the wonderful good fortune to get paid to do it.

Take care of yourselves! See you all in September.

Being a child of the sixties, I’ve been thinking a lot of late about one of the catchphrases of the era: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

And then I ran across the quote from Alice Walker that is currently festooning the head of this article. I think I like that version of the sentiment better. It’s not as accusing. It’s more welcoming. And  by being less aggressive in tone, it makes it easier for others to look at it and think to themselves ‘have I been paying my rent like a good citizen of the planet?’ rather than raising a mental middle finger and saying ‘and you’re telling me this while wearing those shoes?’

As I contemplated all of this, along came some fabulous news from Brit Fat Activist Charlotte Cooper. Her Bad Art Collective has been accepted to be Artists in Residence at the Researching Feminist Futures symposium at the University of Edinburgh in September.

Their project is called Bombarded By Images a multi-media performance based installation.

Cooper et al are tired of the phrase ‘Bombarded by images’ used in so many cultural discussions. For one thing, they feel that ‘media’ gets used to describe an impenetrable monolith, while the fact is that media… well… covers a heck of a lot of things that are approached from radically different angles. What’s more, the Bad Art Collective have decided they can be a medium, too, and bombard the world with very different images of fat, of womanhood, of feminism, and of random ponies.

And you know what? They can. I can. You can. We all can.

I don’t care what your cause is. I’ve chosen several for myself, and I write about them, talk about them, donate to groups fighting for the causes that matter to me. Your causes may be quite different from mine. That’s no biggie to me. I’m not even that much bothered if our causes are in direct conflict. I will disagree with them, but I can still engage with you as a human being without rancor. Each of us must find our own beliefs that work for us as individuals, and then act on those beliefs as our consciences direct us.

If you’re worried that you can’t be an activist because you can’t devote your whole life to one cause or you don’t have a lot of money, don’t panic. Just read this article from last year at All Things Wildly Considered about activism. Then figure out what matters to you.

Whether you choose feeding the hungry, FA, feminism, literacy, drug abuse prevention/treatment, fighting a disease that has affected your life, your church, atheism, animal rights, your favorite political party, free speech, the care and feeding of attractive rugby players, something else, or half a dozen different causes at once, just get involved in something. Care. Engage.

We all have something to give. Each and every one of us will need help at some point in some way. It feels good to pay the rent.

And there is nothing more superfantastic than passion.