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If wine weren’t enough for male bonding, when Ronnie and Willie got together to cook, it was scary. They could carry on for days about how to really cook a lamb. Right. Like the lamb cared. As they would debate all of the permutations of preparation, spices, and cooking time, they would twitch with glee. They were like crackheads getting ready for their next fix. Sometimes it really freaked me out. Okay, not sometimes. Always. It always freaked me the fuck out.

It upsets me that my brother never got to see America’s changed attitude toward food. He was blogging about restaurants when he lived in France before there even was “blahginnnnng.” This was in the late eighties, when hardly anyone in America gave a shit about food. This was before supersizing your fast-food meal was all the rage and cardiologists from one end of this country to the other were building additions to their houses. For God’s sake, he missed the arrival of the Food Network. Talk about life not being fair. Or maybe it is. Maybe he would have lost his mind watching it. So many kitchens, so many cuisines, and so little time. Goddamnit. This was his era, “the golden age of food.”

I am always saddened when I think about all of the things we never had the chance to share. (If there’s a true downside to Christmas, it’s remembering all of the folks who have passed on along the way, all that you have lost. Christmas may be about the birth of the baby Jesus, but it also makes you think a lot about the people you want to spend time with but can’t anymore.)

Yum. This wine sure is tasty. Remember, Lewis, you have to pace yourself. You’re starting your Christmas celebrating at 1:00 p.m., and you won’t be done until at least midnight, so don’t go overboard too early. Take small sips, Lewis, very small sips. I’ve never been good at drinking during the day. This is a marathon, and there’s no way to train for it, and if you did, you’d have to go to rehab by the time New Year’s Eve rolled around.

I also have to keep an eye on my food consumption. I am facing two huge meals that day, from a dazzling array of appetizers to a scrumptious series of desserts. And I love food. Not in a foodie way, in a love way—a deep, abiding adoration and worship kind of a way. I live and breathe to be immersed in a universe of tastes.

I’m not an idiot. I know two massive meals in a day is wrong. It’s bad for my health. Bad for my stomach, bad for my large intestine. Bad for my small intestine. Bad for my colon (which I think is either my large or small intestine, I can’t remember). It’s bad all around. And it’s greedy and piggish and self-indulgent.

Let’s face it, there’s no excuse for this kind of behavior. People all over the world are starving and on this day I eat what a family of eight might consume in a week. But, God help me, that doesn’t stop me.

I am like a locust on Christmas Day, and as I chew through everything that’s set in front of me, from olives to exotic cheeses to dried meats to chips and dips to clams casino to the hindquarters or forequarters or whatever quarters of the cow I find before me, one thought haunts me.

“Did I write a big enough check to America’s Harvest to make up for this gluttony?”

I never know. One of the great things about me—and that category is a narrow one—is I don’t need people around me to be judgmental about my behavior. Nobody is more judgmental about me than me. It’s a gift.

So I wonder will God show me pictures of this day when he consigns me to the third ring of hell, where one is forced to view videos of buffets from around the world for an eternity and beyond?

But if I don’t come to Christmas dinners with my friends, what am I supposed to say to them?

“Well, no, I can’t make it this year because I’m afraid I will face eternal damnation for eating one too many chèvres. . . . Oh, you’re only serving two. Never mind. I’ll be there.”

As I ponder my sin, while sipping my second glass of wine, Willie and Jenny are preparing another incomparable