Family

You can't help but think about family around the holidays. I grew up with a massive amount of cousins sharing all of our Christmas loot at 2:00 in the morning Christmas Eve. The noisy, crowded family Christmas is part of my past and gave me a sense early on that the best part of any celebration is seeing all of those people that you love. As a little girl, that could have been as often as every 2 weeks, with one or another of my cousins having a birthday party. As often as we would get together, it was always special and fun.
As I've gotten older, it doesn't happend that way so much. If I get to see one of my cousins once or twice a year these days, I consider myself lucky and think about them for a long time afterwards. It's not like they live so far away, only a handful have left the LA area. It's just that we get so busy, building families and careers, homes and new lives, that its hard to make the time to get together as often as we did back then.
Yet when we do, it's like we have been together all this time. There is a connection between family members that seems to be suspended in time, just put on hold until we next meet. I look forward to those moments mostly to try to find what is new and different about my relatives, how they have changed and grown. You can't help but go back to those fun memories of the childhood highjinks, the "Remember when we..." Yet I always leave in amazement of how far my cousins have come and what great things life still holds for them.
Most of my cousins don't yet have children, but the balance is starting to shift in favor of those who do. Every year I say, well, this family is just going to get bigger and we will have more kids around to relive our glorious childhood festivities. It hasn't really worked out that way so far, for me, at least, but I am starting to see it on the horizen. I imagine that I will soon be the mom asking where my shoes are when its time to go home, knowing that the kids have hidden them under the couch so that they can go on playing.
Do my cousins feel the same way and look forward to watching the kids play and being the grownups at the kitchen table? We always imagined that our poor parents had to endure this to keep us happy, but maybe they were having even more fun. We'll see.