Last year, Gregory Stuart flew in from Los Angeles to Phoenix to enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday with his family and friends. Over the course of Thanksgiving dinner and the remainder of the weekend, the very friends and family he had come to see ended up making fun of him. Turning to a friend for support, he was instead told, “I would have laughed at you, too.”

What had he done to bring about such ridicule?

He had asked his mother to prepare him a vegetarian entrée for Thanksgiving dinner.

Stuart became a vegetarian in 2001 out of moral concerns that animals had to be killed for him to eat them. His experience is perhaps more extreme than what most vegetarians undergo on Thanksgiving Day. Still, the holiday presents difficulties for many others who choose a meat-free diet. In addition to taking pains to avoid offending hosts and cooks by passing on many or most of the prepared dishes, vegetarians often have to endure snide remarks, resist pressure to eat foods they do not want to eat, wrestle through ethical issues and manage to find enough to eat on a day when most others cannot avoid eating too much. Whereas most Americans savor Thanksgiving, vegetarians often find themselves dreading it.

“I didn’t think it was selfish to ask for one entrée,” Stuart says. His Thanksgiving disaster culminated in a trip to Boston Market to pick up some macaroni and cheese.

Tensions between vegetarians and non-vegetarians can be exacerbated on a holiday renowned for the consumption of meat. Those tensions can lead to barbs and insults even among loved ones.

Marisa Gertz is a pastry chef from Tempe who became a vegetarian 12 years ago and a vegan a year subsequent to that. (A vegan is a vegetarian who does not consume any animal products, such as milk or eggs.) The fact that Gertz is a recovering anorexic who has difficulty digesting meat does not stop friends and family from nagging her every year at the Thanksgiving table by saying, “Come on, a little turkey wouldn’t kill you.”

Another type of Thanksgiving tension has its roots in ethical concerns. Some vegetarians believe that eating meat is not only undesirable, but immoral as well. For them, the day can present a dilemma: how to enjoy a holiday that brings family together without dwelling on the disturbing aspects of the day.

“It’s definitely odd celebrating [Thanksgiving] with people who are glorifying a holiday by killing another animal. That’s kind of depressing,” says Jason Wyrick, who credits his vegan diet with taking away and keeping away all symptoms of his diabetes.

Wyrick, an Ahwatukee resident who last year founded Devil Spice, an online company providing vegan catering, cooking classes and jarred foods, believes that the best way for a vegetarian or vegan to get through the moral distress of Thanksgiving Day is to box away the worries. “If you don’t put those thoughts aside, you’ll go crazy and become misanthropic,” he warns.

In addition to de-emphasizing moral concerns, a vegetarian can be rescued from Thanksgiving despondency by focusing on a more pleasurable aspect of the holiday: spending time with family.

Leslie Teitelbaum, a holistic nutrionist from Tempe, spent her first couple of Thanksgivings, after moving to Arizona, taking her grandparents to Mexico to have margaritas, chips and salsa. Teitelbaum, a vegetarian since the age of five, abhors the notion that turkeys are bred specifically to end up on Thanksgiving tables. Nonetheless she manages to enjoy some elements of the holiday, even in more traditional settings back here in the United States. “I do like getting together with people. It’s a good excuse to see your family and friends and hang out and watch football,” she says.

Even in the absence of all the day’s other potential difficulties, vegetarians face a common Thanksgiving challenge; how to find something to eat at dinner on a day when dinner is synonymous with turkey. Over time, some vegetarians adapt to this dietary challenge by preparing and bringing their own dishes with a Thanksgiving flair.

For example, this Thanksgiving Wyrick will be preparing a pumpkin risotto to be served inside a pumpkin. His culinary skills allow him to see through challenges and actually spot an opportunity for vegetarians at the Thanksgiving table.

“It helps being a good chef because when you’re around people who are eating the turkey, giblet gravy and all that stuffing, they’re still trying your cooking. They get exposed to vegetarian food and so they become more accepting of that over time,” he says.

For those vegetarians who cannot muster up such optimism or even an appetite on their turkeyless Turkey Day, there is still hope to avoid going bed with an empty stomach, at least according to Stuart.

“As a last resort, you can go to Boston Market.”