#family-gatherings

#family-gatherings

This week can truly fly by, so make sure you pause often to take it all in - the twinkly lights, the festive meals, your Instagrammable outfits - and feel grateful. The last thing you want is to look up on. Jan. 1 and think, "Wait, there did the time go?" To really lean into the warm fuzzies this week, get rid of distractions.

I've been married to my wife, Jamie, for 37 years. We have four married children and 16 grandchildren. Our oldest grandchild is 12, and our youngest isn't quite one yet. Once our kids started having children, they all moved back closer to home in Cincinnati, where we live. We own a five-bedroom home that's about 4,000 square feet. We're empty nesters, so there's plenty of space for us, but when the whole family is over, everyone is on top of each other.

Whenever I get together with my extended family, games are a guarantee, and that's especially true around the holidays. In fact, there's chatter happening now about what games will be played when everyone meets up for Christmas. Because there are so many of us, my relatives and I tend to split our time between indoors and outdoors, which usually means the firepit is going and a variety of games are set up on the patio and in the backyard.

Forcing children to accept unwanted affection can send a harmful message, according to Karen Days, the former president of the Center for Family Safety and Healing at Nationwide Children's Hospital. Days explained that this kind of forced affection can teach children the wrong lesson: that people they know are always allowed to touch them. She pointed out that while parents often emphasize "stranger danger," they don't always stress that familiar adults must also respect personal boundaries.

This summer has been a season jam-packed with a rapid succession of family reunions, road trips to visit far-flung loved ones, and hosting what a friend impishly refers to as "house pests." As a non-parent introvert, I'm saturated. The extended immersion in family gatherings involves everyone else's children. Doesn't matter if the kids are absent or in attendance. They're still omnipresent, mentioned frequently as a main topic of conversation.

King Henry VII's love for roast beef not only influenced culinary traditions but also gave rise to the nickname 'Beefeaters' for his guards, highlighting the royal impact on food customs.