Sorry to riff on something so irrelevant to this wonderfully crafted story. I didn't mean to be crass. My mind just ran away with this vision of a picky and temporarily agitated child's reaction to a relatively unfamiliar food appearing at a holiday meal whose menu is an immutable construct that absolutely nobody ever EVER questions. And kids can be very funny about food. Nothing will make a kid act out like when all the adults are straining to keep a smile on their faces, expecting the kids to follow suit, and all of the kids see through the hypocrisy of it all, as they always do. It just takes one kid giving a certain kind of twitchy look to another kid over some little unspoken thing that they both get, and everything comes apart, hilariously.