On Holidays and Family – The Love and The Suckiness

Every family tells stories each time they gather. They laugh over memories and moments. They remember the year your brother Tommy threw up on the Thanksgiving table after your uncle forced him to try brussels sprouts. “Just try them. Take a bite. If you don’t like them, you don’t have to finish them, but you have to try them.” Poor Tommy got himself so worked up over it he probably doesn’t know whether he likes brussels sprouts to this day because one single bite had him spewing all over the table and ruining several plates of food.

On Holidays and Family – The Love and The Suckiness

Family and the holidays. A wonderful, magical combination right? We see people we promise (and want to!) (or don’t want to!) to see more often but never do because our lives get in the way, and a week turns into a year without even trying.

We do see them over the holidays though. Which is love and connection. Laughter and love.

Or, suckiness and sadness and missing those who are no longer with us. Maybe the holidays contain both laughter and sadness for each of us. We remember getting goosebumps over fireworks but also remember words that hurt and are hard to forget. One holiday can bring memories of The Best Night Ever, but also of the year your father-in-law said “He’s just a runt that can’t talk,” in front of the “runt,” who is your son.

Holidays bring pressure to find the perfect gift for those you love, and pressure to love the gifts given to you from them. Each one holds the potential for future stories retold so often that the kids who weren’t even born yet remind you of bits of them. “You forgot to tell about that game you played in the backyard before that!” they say.

A big holiday is coming and I’m cooking dinner for my local family, which will be wonderful, as I haven’t lived near enough to any family to host a holiday at my own home in many years. Never, since Tucker was born. As always, I’ve left most preparation until the final moments, figuring I have the weekend to figure it out, and worrying that maybe I was supposed to order a turkey a month ago. “Whatever, you can always cook something else” is something I remind myself of often, but still.

I want the day to be about stories and laughter and connecting rather than stories told about the year the turkey was still almost raw at 8pm. Although that, too, would be one of those things I’d cry about this year and laugh about for the rest.

This holiday season, my advice to myself and to you is to be as kind to yourself as you are to your dumb but good-hearted cousin. To accept that our differences make us human and disagreements sometimes bring us closer. That linking hands before a meal is what family is about, and has been since the beginning of time.

This holiday season, be your best you, to you. This holiday season, I’m going to be a better me. Or, at least I’ll try. It’s easy to worry about how everybody’s doing.

Listen to yourself, and treat her the way you’d want somebody to treat your child. After all, that’s the best gift of all. Kindness spreads and starting with being kind to YOU feels like the best gift any of us can give.

This has been a Finish the Sentence Friday post, where Kenya (from Sporadically Yours) and I host a prompt. This week’s a five-minute stream-of-consciousness post about “Family and the holidays…” I went over five minutes, mostly because my husband and son were interrupting me but more because I just had more to say after five minutes.