The Cure to World Hunger: My Mother's Cooking

I am an actor. I am an actor and I will never be convinced otherwise. Maybe a little explaining is needed? Well then, let me start from the beginning. Before I start, let ye be warned, this will be nothing less than a cynic's tangent. So hide yo’ wife, hide yo’ kids, because things are about to get volatile. Now, let's get down to business. Every year my family has a huge Christmas Eve blowout. I don't know why the Creek family chose Christmas Eve to throw the festivities, but it has always been tradition to eat to explosive proportion, and then open up our presents which, if you're a big fan of disappointment, will never disappoint. Perhaps, for some reason, everybody fattening up the day before Christmas gives a head start on yet another failed New Year's resolution. And maybe this event wouldn't be something that I blacked out on my calendar with a jumbo sharpie if it weren't my entire extended family in my parents' singlewide trailer. Claustrophobic yet? However, the very worst of it would have to be the cooking.

My mom is under the misconception that she can cook. I don't know when or where in the world she got this notion, but it's as if Martha Stuart got hit with an extraordinary amount of Gamma radiation that turned her green and deadly whenever she was near food... that is my mother. It's like God gave her taste buds as a joke! Anyways, all this bashing is beside the point. Every Christmas Eve, in order to uphold silly traditions, my mom cooks what she would like to call a honey roasted ham, an abomination that has nearly turned me vegetarian on many occasions. This is always to be followed up by her culinary take on the sponge. The Germans in my bloodline that have passed down this family recipe from generation to generation like to call it strudel, but I call it a sponge because it has the uncanny ability to suck every bit of moisture out of a person's mouth. However, the fun doesn't stop there.

While my mom may be killer in the kitchen (I wish I weren’t be literal here), she is not the only one diagnosed with this terrible cooking disease. In fact, on Christmas Eve, the disease becomes an epidemic with my household being the quarantine zone. I think it might be a gene passed through the generations. Anyways, for some reason everyone in my extended family insists that they bring their own baked goodies to have them judged alongside my mom's own Chernobyl-stricken monstrosities. And who better to be the judge them than yours truly? That's right, I am the lucky judge of this poison-eating contest, and it is an honor that I wear proudly. It seems that when it comes to judging, I never clock off.

So why am I a great actor? Need I even answer that question? For no one else could hide his or her contempt for such a holiday get-together behind a smile as well as I. However, in the grand scheme of things, I realize how important this is to my mother and the rest of the family. I put on a smile, both fake and genuine. Fake because I hope that someday they will realize that I am not smiling, but simply baring my teeth and then they might put and end to feeding me their home-made urinal cakes, but genuine in the knowledge that this is one of the few times I get to see my family together. And when it comes to my family, as much as I love to harp on them, I do love our time together.