Celebrating Family
The family reunion is as firmly entrenched an American summer tradition as is the Fourth of July and fireworks.
Traditional family reunions are a gathering of kin, highlighted by tables groaning with favorite foods in a church fellowship hall or park or spread across the lawn at Grandma’s place.
These days a family reunion may mean flying or driving cross country and spending a week at the beach or in the mountains, going on a cruise, or joining forces for a once in a life time adventure. In recent weeks I have heard of family reunions featuring fancy dinner parties and dances, card playing marathons, organized sports and worship services.
When I was a child the interstate highway system was in its infancy, and it took 16 hours to drive from upstate South Carolina to Northeast Ohio, through seemingly endless switchbacks in the West Virginia Mountains, to our family reunion. This in a two-seat sedan with up to nine people and no AC. It was not fun.
The pay off was two or three weeks at Grandpa and Grandma’s farm and the homes of various aunts, uncles and cousins. I never tired of helping Grandpa feed the pigs or getting underfoot while my uncle milked the cows. There was nothing like floating on inner tubes in the farm pond with my cousins or chasing fireflies in the seemingly endless summer twilight.
And sometime during our visit most of the 41 first cousins, and 20 aunts and uncles would gather on a Sunday afternoon and spread tables and chairs under the trees at my grandparent’s farm. After a feast of home grown foods, the adults talked the day away and the kids scattered to find their own entertainment, in the outbuildings, orchards, and fields.
My most recent reunion – no less enjoyable – was a long weekend at a mountain resort with my five brothers and our spouses.
Whatever form it takes – and whether the headcount is 10, 50 or hundreds – family reunions are a time to reconnect, reminisce and get in touch with your roots and perhaps to understand yourself, your siblings, your parents or grandparents a little better. It’s an opportunity to check your memories with those of siblings or cousins and realize that someone else may have experienced the same event in a different way. It’s a chance to consider how you can be so different and yet so much the same.
If you are blessed with a family that gets along it will be great fun. If not, you will still learn to know yourself and your family better.
And the better you know your family, the more you will understand yourself. The more you appreciate your family, the more you will accept yourself.