Please consider this: You are going to be celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ on Wednesday, December 25th. In Jesus’ honor, please do not sit at a table where flesh is served (note 1). Celebrating Jesus’ birth cannot and should not include the eating of animal flesh and secretions. Jesus Christ and His brother James were staunch animal rights activists and never ate animals. Anything you hear or read to the contrary is a lie designed to fool you and convince you that it is okay to do so and supported scripturally. These falsehoods have been written in by evil beings who want you to fail spiritually and physically.
As a spiritual leader—and you may hate me for saying this—if you consider yourself vegan and spiritual, you are committing blasphemy if you sit at a table on Christmas where animal products are consumed. If you do so, you are doing so at your own spiritual peril. You cannot consider yourself a lover of God or Jesus Christ if you are in the house of devils.
Cancel your plans to visit family or friends who eat flesh. Return any gifts bought for them and call to explain why. I would think that anyone who has stopped eating animals and knows the health benefits has shared that knowledge with everyone they “care” about. So, why, if they refuse to stop eating animals, would you want to be with them anyway? Call and tell them you do not wish to visit, as it is against your principles to support the cruelty of the animal agricultural industries. I am sure you have tried educating them, and they refused.
Jesus, when He recruited the disciples, said to them in Luke 14:26: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple."
Why would He say that? Could it be that they were all flesh eaters? Could it be that prior to meeting Jesus, the disciples, too, ate flesh? There is no better time to explain why you can no longer visit a house where flesh is served. If you want to celebrate the birth of Christ with flesh eaters, then do it on your own terms. Have them over to your house and allow only plant-based foods to be consumed. If you do not have a home that is suitable, find a public pavilion to use. But whatever you do this Christmas, do it for the animals, please.
Notes
1. According to Paul, Peter withdrew from the table of the Gentiles because he discriminated against the uncircumcised (Gal. 2:12). But the real issue was probably, again, food-related. Endorsed by the apostolic decree, the Jewish Christians abstained from dead flesh (Clementine Homilies 7.4). To them every meal is sacred and for that reason -- like the Eucharist to this day -- is to be shared exclusively with other believers, as noted by Akers (2020:154, 156).
Meanwhile, the Jewish Christianity regarded any table with meat on it the "table of devils" (Clementine Homilies 8.20, 9.9). Devils possess whoever sheds blood, consumes dead flesh or animals strangled or sacrificed to idols (Clementine Homilies 8.19). Now those Gentile followers of Paul were probably meat-eaters for Paul taught them to eat any meat sold in the market without questions of conscience (1 Corinthians 10:25). Perhaps, initially, Peter thought that it was okay to dine with those meat-eating Gentiles as long as he himself ate only vegan food. Probably, when James' men arrived, they reminded him of the apostolic decree and he joined them at their vegan table, which Paul exaggeratingly interpreted as social segregation or Apartheid. It was the vegan decree which infuriated Paul and triggered off his spiteful denunciation of Peter and the Law itself (cf. Akers 2020:156) once he had returned to his own territory in Antioch.
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