Ah, the holidays.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Christmas, and what it means to celebrate with our friends and family. Take my family, for example. No, really. Take them. I don’t want them. Just kidding. Sort of.

My family is exhausting. I love them all so much, and I know they love me, but we really tire of each other easily. I only live 45 minutes away from most of them, but the way we avoid each other like the plague you’d think we lived on opposite sides of the country. You get all of us together and there is always some sort of crisis going on. Enter the holiday season, where you have Thanksgiving and Christmas back to back, both of which requiring multiple stops and numerous excruciating familial festivities.

It seems, though, that the holidays are the only time of year that you excuse your family for their craziness. Because, well, it’s the holidays. And they’re family. And they’re crazy. If it were not for Christmas, I wonder how long we would put off going home to visit. Thank goodness for the holidays. I’m grateful for the traditions we have created in my family, and the fact that it is expected that, at least once a year, we are all going to take the time to sit down together and pretend to like each other. Just kidding. Sort of.

I’ve found, though, that I can get along with everyone in my family individually. It’s when we’re altogether that our differences really tend to show. Perhaps it’s the shock of going from hardly ever seeing any of them to being crammed into one house with all of them at once. Maybe it’s because when they’re altogether, I am reminded of how similar they are to one another, and how different that makes me feel as the black sheep of the family. It could even be that, combined, they are an unstoppable force of nature that becomes one heaping brood of destruction, made entirely out of gossip, calamity, and deep-fried foods.

My sister and I took my dad out to breakfast yesterday for his birthday. We really had a great time, despite the fact that my sister and I both agree there is absolutely no reason to be awake so early on a Saturday morning. Breakfast is Dad’s favorite meal of the day, though, and somehow or another he actually enjoys starting his day before dawn. Personally, I would have preferred a celebratory late-night-snack. But I digress. It was nice getting together and laughing, feeding off of each other’s differences. My Dad taught us about gardening and mechanics, my sister about teaching and motherhood. I spent the first half of the breakfast asking for iTunes gift cards for Christmas, and the second half explaining what they were and how they were used.

It’s interesting to think about the traits you have due to the family you were born into. It’s even more interesting to think about the traits you have despite them.

In a lot of ways, I think I am like my Dad. Imaginative, hard-working, good with my hands. I have watched my Dad build so many things over the years, with nothing more than an idea in his head and a bottle of beer in his hand. “Just drinkin’ and thinkin’…”, he’d say. My Dad can fix anything. Cars, lawnmowers, electrical wiring. He can install your cable and build you an entertainment center for it all at the same time. Although I don’t plan on doing any serious mechanic work in the near future, he did make sure I knew how to do the bare basics; change the oil, change a tire, install a cupholder on the four-wheeler to hold your beer. Drinkin’ and thinkin’, indeed.

In other ways, I think I am like my Mom. Maternal, domestic, emotional. Chris says that if I had any more estrogen I would be a breast. I’m not very comfortable around other people’s children, but I do love to take care of house and home for Chris and our pets. Something happens to me when one of them is sick, or hurt, or upset…it’s like this gene kicks in, and all of a sudden I turn into Mary freakin’ Poppins. I remember I was taking Riley for a ride not long ago, and I had to slam on brakes. You know that thing that moms do, where they throw out their arm to hold you in place, as if they could really keep you safer than the seatbelt in the event you are being catapulted out of the front windshield? I don’t know if Riley was more afraid of the sudden stop or the unsuspected motherly limb that came flying across the front of her chest. Either way, as soon as I realized what I’d done I thought “I have turned into my mother.” And, you know, that wouldn’t be a very bad thing.

Family is time-consuming and, at times, unbelievably stressful. But I’m glad to have the family that I have. I’m looking forward to Christmas and all the annoyances that I will undoubtedly complain about in the days to come.