Holidays mean time spent with your family,
whether you’re a huge fan of your family members or not. Sometimes, this can be
a great reunion with distant family members who you’ve dearly missed. Other
times, it can spell anxiety and stress as you prepare yourself to hang out with
your dysfunctional family.
No matter which situation best describes you
and your family, though, you’re likely looking forward to the holiday because
it almost always means great home-cooked food, some gift giving, and time away
from the daily grind.
My family, for example, doesn’t often meet up
throughout the year. But when we do, I’m always having laughs with my brother
and our cousins. Perhaps it’s because we don’t see one another very often.
Perhaps it’s because we like to reminisce back on our younger days. Or perhaps
it’s because the four of us get along better in our family than anyone else.
All three seem like viable answers to me.
But the holidays can also remind you of how
distant some of your family members may be. Maybe they’re distant in the fact
that they live far away from you and your closer more local family. Maybe
they’re distant because you don’t see eye to eye anymore like you used to and
they just don’t come around anymore.
For those who are farther away, though,
there’s something to be said for both parties having the responsibility of
catch up somehow. While the advent of technology makes it quite easy to still
contact them no matter their distance, it’s not always the easiest to still
feel like it’s the holiday season.
Most of my family is local and within a two
hour drive of me, so we see pretty much everyone each time a major holiday
rolls around. But we do happen to have some pretty close family that lives at
least 15 hours away by car, so it can sometimes be a few years in between
visits.
The best remedy to these sorts of situations
is mailing gifts to them as little surprises. Even though a lot of people don’t
exchange gifts on Easter (save for giving stuff to the children), I still enjoy
sending a little something to my family down south just to show them I still
think about them. By rounding up a few shipping boxes, packing some unique
little gifts in them, and sending them down, I can show that they’re still a
part of the family even if they can’t be here. And almost always I end up
receiving a few shipping boxes in return with whatever it is they gathered
together for me and my parents.
