Countdown: Wit & Wisdom on Preparing for Holidays with the Family

Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice. ~Dave Barry

Ready or not, the holidays are just around the corner. As of today, it’s just 19 days till Thanksgiving, and 50 days till Christmas. Tis the season for family gatherings.

Holidays with family can be challenging enough, but when you blend relatives through marriage they can get downright comical. Take our family for instance. My family is very reserved – no hugging, kissing or other displays of affection – think Adams Family. In fact to this day my sister and I have a tradition of greeting each other with a handshake as an inside joke on our childhood.

My husband’s family is the complete opposite … boisterous, happy, non-stop chatter – not a word of it in English. Even small family gatherings attract a minimum of 30 to 40 relatives and everyone, every-single-one, expects a hug and a kiss from you – coming and going. It can take 45 minutes just to work your way from one side of the room to the other!

And we love them all, but for most of us there’s just something about the holidays that has the potential to bring out the worst in families. Throw in a couple of divorces, in-laws, sibling rivalries, and grudges older than your great-uncle Harry–and you’ve got a recipe for disaster, or at the very least some hurt feelings and crushed expectations.

So, in preparation for the rapidly approaching season of family gatherings, I thought it might be nice to take a moment to consider all the positive qualities of family.

• The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together. ~Erma Bombeck
• Family is just accident…. They don’t mean to get on your nerves. They don’t even mean to be your family, they just are. ~Marsha Norman
• If you ever start feeling like you have the goofiest, craziest, most dysfunctional family in the world, all you have to do is go to a state fair. Because five minutes at the fair, you’ll be going, ‘you know, we’re alright. We are dang near royalty. ~Jeff Foxworthy
• Blood relatives often have nothing to do with family, and similarly, family is about who you choose to make your life with. ~Oliver Hudson
• In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will melt. ~Barbara Dale
• I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage. ~Erma Bombeck
• The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life. ~Richard Bach
• One of life’s greatest mysteries is how the boy who wasn’t good enough to marry your daughter can be the father of the smartest grandchild in the world. ~ Proverb
• We never truly understand the love of our parents for us till we become parents ourselves. ~Henry Ward Beecher
• Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your head. ~Martin Mull
• I don’t believe an accident of birth makes people sisters or brothers. It makes them siblings, gives them mutuality of parentage. Sisterhood and brotherhood is a condition people have to work at. ~Maya Angelou
• It was nice growing up with a younger brother – someone to lean on, someone to count on… someone to tell on! ~Author Unknown
• To the outside world we all grow old. But not to brothers and sisters. We know each other as we always were. We know each other’s hearts. We share private family jokes. We remember family feuds and secrets, family grief and joy. We live outside the touch of time. ~Clara Ortega
• Many a man wishes he were strong enough to tear a telephone book in half – especially if he has a teenage daughter. ~Guy Lombardo
• Any man can be a father. It takes someone special to be a dad. ~Author Unknown
• There are three stages of a man’s life: He believes in Santa Claus, he doesn’t believe in Santa Claus, he is Santa Claus. ~Author Unknown
• It’s not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can’t tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself. ~Joyce Maynard
• Our siblings push buttons that cast us in roles we felt sure we had let go of long ago – the baby, the peacekeeper, the caretaker, the avoider…. It doesn’t seem to matter how much time has elapsed or how far we’ve traveled. ~Jane Mersky Leder
• Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom, has instilled within each of us a powerful biological instinct to reproduce; this is her way of assuring that the human race, come what may, will never have any disposable income. ~Dave Barry
• A mom forgives us all our faults, not to mention one or two we don’t even have. ~Robert Brault
• Our grandchildren accept us for ourselves, without rebuke or effort to change us, as no one in our entire lives has ever done, not our parents, siblings, spouses, friends – and hardly ever our own grown children. ~Ruth Goode
• Becoming a grandmother is wonderful. One moment you’re just a mother. The next you are all-wise and prehistoric. ~Pam Brown
• The best baby-sitters, of course, are the baby’s grandparents. You feel completely comfortable entrusting your baby to them for long periods, which is why most grandparents flee to Florida. ~Dave Barry
• To a small child, the perfect granddad is unafraid of big dogs and fierce storms but absolutely terrified of the word “boo.” ~Robert Brault
• A mother becomes a true grandmother the day she stops noticing the terrible things her children do because she is so enchanted with the wonderful things her grandchildren do. ~Lois Wyse
• Siblings are the people we practice on, the people who teach us about fairness and cooperation and kindness and caring, quite often the hard way. ~Pamela Dugdale
• If you don’t understand how a woman could both love her sister dearly and want to wring her neck at the same time, then you were probably an only child. ~Linda Sunshine
• Family isn’t about whose blood you have. It’s about who you care about. ~Trey Parker
• Soon we will again find ourselves enmeshed in the Holiday Season, that very special time of year when we join with our loved ones in sharing centuries-old traditions such as trying to find a parking space at the mall. We traditionally do this in my family by driving around the parking lot until we see a shopper emerge from the mall, then we follow her, in very much the same spirit as the Three Wise Men, who 2,000 years ago followed a star, week after week, until it led them to a parking space. ~Dave Barry

So let’s hear it for our families: They may be slightly flawed, but they’re all ours.

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