Family Celebrations

If you can’t get rid of the family skeleton, you might as well make it dance.

George Bernard Shaw

It’s the season of jack- o -lanterns, ghosts, skeletons and trick or treat. It doesn’t matter the holiday, we celebrate them all. On Halloween you will find us each carving our own pumpkin and putting it outside on the steps, before we sit down to a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs with my grandmother’s recipe for marinara sauce. We’ll have pumpkin ice cream and ginger cookies for dessert. Trader Joe’s has the best pumpkin ice cream ever. After dinner we’ll watch a Halloween movie. Often it’s, Hocus Pocus. We’re all Bette Midler fans.

Our family is very small with no little children to join in the festivities. That doesn’t stop us from celebrating, no matter the holiday. It’s a time to gather together and add to our collection of memories. Our family, like any other, isn’t perfect. We’ve had our share of drama, arguments and loss. Still we find our way back together. Maybe, because there are just a few of us, we are motivated to hang on to what we have.

When I hear young mothers complain about the difficulties of being a parent I can sympathize. The reality is, as trite as it sounds, those nights of no sleep staying up with a small baby or spending every afternoon ferrying kids from one event to the next will be over in a heartbeat. You will look back at that time and won’t be able to fathom how quickly it went. One minute you’re packing a diaper bag and the next a trunk for collage.

On another note. The papier-mache pumpkin, in the second photo, has been in our family for almost 100 years. It belonged to my mother when she was a child.