Family holiday dinners

 We get together with extended family for all the major holidays; Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. We eat the same thing every year. Thanksgiving is your typical American dinner consisting of Turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, rolls, various pies, stuffing, cranberry sauce and a few other miscellaneous items. We get together on Christmas Eve, and order from this local place called "Mike's." We get platters of lasagna, chicken and broccoli alfredo and garlic bread. I bake ham and people bring appetizers and desserts. My mother-in-law brings swedish meatballs and some type of fish that's possibly pickled herring or something like that. They are Swedish, and I'm not, so I haven't had the courage to try that fish, as it just looks so... gross. But, I do love the Swedish meatballs, so there's that. And at Easter, we eat a lamb dinner...mint jelly and all. I don't particularly like lamb, nor mint jelly, but I eat it. I eat it because it's been a tradition for my in-laws forever, and I don't want to make them change it just because I don't care too much for it. It's starting to grow on me, a little bit. 

I love the holidays. Not only for the food, but for the company and experience that goes along with it. You see, I got divorced 4 years ago. And guess what? For 4 years, I have continued to have my ex-husband, my ex-mother-in-law, my ex-sister-in-law, her husband, her two daughters and their husbands, my mom and her boyfriend, and my sister, her husband and my nephew... all over to my house for these meals. The younger ones even still sleep over. I'm still "Aunt Jami" to them. We all laugh and tell funny stories, play board games while eating dessert, drink a lot of alcohol (someone inevitably gets in an argument, but hey...what family doesn't?) and just enjoy the holiday as a family. We take an annual group photo after Christmas Eve dinner and post it to social media with the hashtag "Modernfamily." 

I love that I have been able to keep my boy's family unit together for them since the divorce. People can't believe that we still do this, four years later. After the first year, everyone said, "Well, that's not going to last." I'll admit, we came close last year to it all going up in flames, but we figured it out. I think that's because my ex and I love our kids more than we dislike each other. We are still a family. Not a cookie-cutter family, but a family nonetheless. 

We only all get together like this for holiday meals. My mother-in-law has Alzheimer’s disease, and it’s starting to progress. She still knows who we are and what we are doing at the current time, but you can see it robbing her of her memories, one by one. I’m so glad we have spent all these years making so many memories over these dinners, that maybe she’ll have some extras when the time comes.

 

Here we are:)