My holiday tip? Stay with my mother who is an awful cook and chooses to make things I just can’t stomach. Okay, that sounds mean-spirited, but it’s really not – she tries way too hard, and we’d all be much happier if we bought take-and-bake pizzas and ate sandwiches instead of sweet potato casserole with approximately 3 pounds of brown sugar. ICK!

But on the other side, for some reason, everything I miss about where I’m from seems to consist of food – the great sandwich places (there are 2), the Chinese Buffet my daughter begged for and was better than I remember, the CHEESE FRIES and yummy drinks at another place. And the unlimited sodas at my mom’s house. ACK! And I know her scale is off by a lot, so who knows what I will discover when I get home, although my skinny jeans are fitting really well still.