On Christmas eve, 1989, my mother taught me how to break a wishbone.

"You make a wish," she explained. "And then, pull hard, like this!" With a demonstrative snap, Mom and I held up our spindly charms. Mine looked like a prehistoric doll-sized piano hammer. "You won!" exclaimed my mother. "What did you wish for? Peace on Earth, of course, right?" Ashamed, I hemmed and hawed. "Yes. Peace on Earth."

Later that night, I gave myself a headache trying to channel Santa Claus with telepathy, then left him a plate of digestive biscuits and a handwritten note on the coffee table — the closest thing to a mantelpiece in the Arabian Gulf. "Dear Santa," it read. "For Christmas, I would like peace on Earth, shiny black shoes, and a Snickers bar. Love, Nouf." I figured I'd gain extra points for listing my wishes in decreasing order of quantifiable value. Secretly, I had been thinking about a Snickers bar since I wished on that bone.

In my family, we didn't observe Christmas in the religious sense, but we celebrated it our way. Stockings were the part of Christmas I loved best, never tiring of the magical combination of small and innocuous, sentimental and predictable, edible and inedible little tokens of affection that filled long red felt socks.

There were always walnuts in the shell, clementines and small bags of saffron netting filled with chocolate gold coins, a tribute to the purses filled with gold coins that St. Nicholas clandestinely tossed into the home of a destitute man with three daughters. Oranges, walnuts and chocolate, eaten euphorically and at once, make a wonderful flavor combination. Now, to revive those memories at least once every winter, I make a citrus-scented holiday bread studded with buttery walnuts and chunks of deep, dark chocolate.

2009 wasn't my favorite year and I'm not sorry to see it end. If one of this year's hallmark themes has been decline, then its custom feature is awareness. This was the year I became conscious of how much food I waste at home. This was the year I rendered leaf lard for the first time and never looked back; the year I began watching my cholesterol; the year I installed a drip system and decided to stop paying for fresh mint.

This was the year I resigned as Leader of Slow Food Santa Fe because I lacked the clarity, buoyancy and idealism that carried me through 2008. This was the year that our food chain's staggering abuse of energy really sunk in. This was the year I stepped onto an American public-school campus for the first time, learned about school lunch programs, and grew unable to spend $300 on a KitchenAid mixer for my newly married sister without thinking, "Gee, at the current USDA reimbursement rate, this could buy 116 hungry kids school lunch today."

Since my first wishbone, I've prayed for world peace in Mecca and on Mount Ranier. From where I sit right now, on the balcony of my family's home in the Gulf, looking out across the Straits of Hormuz to where the horizon disappears into Iran, world peace sounds like a hollow platitude; pleasant, pathetic and remote.

So if I could make a wish right now for 2010, it would be for our society to ensure that everyone is better fed. This will take money, time and work — and lots of it. In America, ours is not a caste system like India and Nepal, and yet we are dangerously close to dichotomizing our food system between those who can afford to eat, and those who cannot.

That night, 20 years ago, when I left Santa a note on the coffee table, I saw him. I don't mean that I recalled him from a faded Disney imprint or spotted his supermarket-bound effigy in a dejected felt beard, but that I was roused from my slumber in the dead of night, and crept into the living room, and found Santa Claus there, hulking and massive in a dark green sheepskin and galoshes, smelling of pipe tobacco, livestock and snow. A moment later, he disappeared loudly down the stairs.

Of course, in retrospect, I guess I was either sleepwalking or hallucinating some serious girth around the slender frame of my mother. And yet I must admit, even as a conservative pragmatist, that I cannot help but wonder if the only veil that separates our perception of the extraordinary from that of the ordinary is neither adulthood nor wisdom; it is the belief that some things are just plain impossible. Since I don't intend to start believing that anytime soon, and especially during the holidays, I guess I'll go back to wishbones.

Nouf Al-Qasimi is a freelance writer living in Santa Fe. Send e-mails to food@q.com.