So You’re Having a Vegan for Christmas

VEGANS ARE EVERYWHERE these days. It’s a scientific certainty that you’re never more than 20 feet from one of these animal-product-eschewing kale-nibblers. In fact, they’re getting so common that there’s a very good chance that one of them could be coming round to your house for Christmas dinner this year; perhaps your daughter has started going out with one at university, or maybe your son’s recently taken up with some animal rights types who spend their days sat on their arses in the town centre. But how will you cope with having a gastronomic fundamentalist sat at YOUR festive table? Here’s a few preparations to make and precautions to take in order to make sure your Christmas with a vegan goes off smoothly.

3 FIRST thing on Christmas morning, unplug your internet router and hide it under the stairs or down the back of the couch. At some point during their visit, your vegan will undoubtedly try to make you watch distressing Youtube videos of pigs being slaughtered, day-old chicks going along a conveyor belt into a big mincing machine, or battery hens being de-beaked with pliers, and they won’t be able to do that if they can’t get on the internet. Ask your neighbours to turn their routers off or password-protect their signal in case your vegan attempts to piggy-back onto their wi-fi.

4 ASK Santa Claus to bring you a pair of fleshcoloured bluetooth earphones. At some point during the festivities, you will almost certainly make an innocent remark - for example “Who fancies a nice glass of Merlot?” - that will be leapt upon as an excuse for the vegan to launch into a guilt-inducing diatribe about how red wine is clarified using isinglass, a product made from the swim bladders of fish. As soon as you invariably put your foot in it, sneakily slip in your earphones and enjoy a bit of music while your sanctimonious guest goes on and on and on. Don’t forget to shake your head sadly from time to time, as if troubled by the issue of man’s inhumanity to beast.

5 IT MAY seem a strange thing to do, but invite a vegetarian. If there’s one thing that gets a vegan’s dander up more than a carnivore, it’s someone who doesn’t eat meat but still likes cheese, wears a wool tanktop and has milk in their tea. Vegans view these people as weak-willed, spineless hypocrites who lack the courage of their convictions. Over Christmas, your vegetarian guest will serve as a decoy to draw the vegan’s sanctimonious fire while you take the opportunity to nip out to the shed to enjoy a pork pie, a Peperami and some of your Terry’s Chocolate Orange.

1 BEFORE your vegan arrives, go through all the groceries in your house and carefully check the ingredients for animal products, such as milk, eggs, gelatine, rennet etc. Gather these foodstuffs together and hide them in your shed. The vegan will almost certainly go through your fridge and larder as soon as they get in the house, looking for things to take offence at. A bottle of mayonnaise, a Babybel or even a Quorn pie can set the average vegan off on an arse-numbing, tub-thumping lecture about the evils of the dairy industry that can easily last as long as a James Bond film.

2 NEXT, go through the house and collect anything made of leather, such as shoes, jackets, belts, National Trust bookmarks, Chesterfield chairs etc., and put them in the garage, well away from your eagle-eyed vegan’s judgemental gaze. Then comb the house again for anything made from wool, including carpets, jumpers, blankets and bobble hats, and put them in the garage too. Finally, gather up and hide away any silk items you may own, such as ties, handkerchiefs and jockeys’ shirts. There is nothing more guaranteed to set your vegan off on a two-hour, holier-than-thou sermon about caterpillar abuse in the silk industry than spotting some French knickers, stockings and suspender belts when they’re suspiciously rooting through your wife’s underwear drawer looking for hidden cheese.

6 FEEDING your vegan isn’t as difficult as you might think. Most of them are happy with a plate of sprouts and a spoonful of cranberry sauce (check there’s no gelatine in it, unless you fancy spending Christmas afternoon on the receiving end of a humourless, gruelling tirade about the rendering down of cows’ hooves). Under no circumstances attempt to serve your guest something that says it’s suitable for vegans, as the explanation for why it isn’t could go on well into the evening. If you do cook them something that claims to be vegan, remember to burn the packaging to stop them retrieving it from the bin in order to check the ingredients. Other titbits to avoid putting in front of them include honey which, as your vegan will explain at tedious length, is the product of bee slave labour in sweatshop hives, and figs, which incarcerate fig wasps during their pollination process, even though - as you will at length learn - wasps have just as much right to live as you do, actually.

7 AS YOU settle down with your vegan to watch the Queen’s Speech after lunch, you might think your troubles are over, but you’d be wrong. The feathers in your settee’s cushions could easily trigger a meandering and repetitive monologue, which begins with a graphic description of the inhumane conditions in Canadian goose and eider duck farms, before moving on to the clubbing and live-skinning of seal cubs in Novia Scotia, the annual Faroe Islands whaling festival, and finishing up with commercial fish farming, trout lice, caviar and shark fin soup. Head off this risk in plenty of time by removing all the feathers from your cushions on Christmas Eve, and storing them in your attic. Replace them with some form of vegan-friendly alternative stuffing such as rice, dried peas, or lentils. But do not use dried pasta, unless it’s the durum wheat egg-free variety.