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The last few weeks of lead up to the holidays have been a bustle of activity. You’ve savored the moments watching your son sing with his choir. You’ve busted at the seams watching your daughter accept an award at her sports team banquet. You’ve sat through corporate year-end meetings and lunches. You’ve submitted your last term paper for the semester. You’ve baked and baked and baked. You’ve endured the mall to wrap up gift shopping. You’ve visited ailing friends or relatives. Sound familiar?  And that’s just the stuff we all do. If your family is also juggling food allergies, some...

The holiday season is jam-packed with frivolity and fun and stress and overwhelm. And that’s on a good day. For allergy families, some of the special traditions and joy of the season can be fraught with anxiety.  There’s a buffet table loaded with food that likely contains at least some of your family’s avoidance list. There’s the gift basket a vendor just sent, the one your child is attempting to dig through before you can scan the labels of all the goodies inside. There’s the invite to the cookie exchange. There’s the class party and the team dinner and the...

Managing food allergies – yours or for someone you love – can feel like a full-time job in its own right. It can feel overwhelming. It can be frustrating. Every time you think you have a handle on things, someone changes their manufacturing process or tweaks a recipe and now you’re back to square one in the challenge of finding safe staples for the family diet.  The holiday season, starting this week with Thanksgiving, can bring its own special set of challenges from social gatherings to navigating traditions to potlucks and cookie exchanges. During this stretch in particular, it can...

For most of us, holidays are steeped in traditions. But when we step back and consider what those traditions are, a good number of them are likely linked to food. There’s grandma’s famous strawberry pie recipe that must be made every 4th of July. It’s even brighter and a bigger “bang” than the fireworks. There’s the authentic shortbread cookie following a recipe that your spouse’s great-great-grandparent wrote down on a card before the family emigrated from Scotland so very many years ago. Christmas can’t occur without those cookies wrapped delicately in tissue paper and placed in tin canisters to hand...