Picket Fence Post

How did the Picket Fence Post family ring in 2010? With a champagne toast for the grown-ups and sparkling cider for the kids? With a robust rendition of Auld Lang Syne? Fine food and good humored company?

Wrong. On all counts.

The new decade began with a trip to the ER, two broken bones and a kid running a high temperature.

We’d survived several days of Christmas and Hanukkah celebrations with friends and family highlighted by: A rather aggressive Yankee Swap, grown-ups developing a keen interest in a Spanish liqueur at a Christmas gathering, the kids receiving Wii(and quickly becoming addicted to it and annoyed by my desire to create weird avatars modeled after TV characters) and the Picket Fence Post puppy Max devouring a brand new Star Wars figure a half-hour after we finished unwrapping our presents on Christmas morning. A few days later, on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve day, I was quietly reading The Book Thief  by the fire while the Eldest Boy was sleeping his way through a cold (and a fever), The Girl was playing at the neighbors’ house and The Spouse was ice skating at an outdoor rink in a town park with The Youngest Boy.

Then the call came.

“I’m hurt. You need to come and get me and take me to the hospital.”

I dragged The Eldest Boy out of bed and drove to the rink to find The Youngest Boy shaken and in tears, while The Spouse’s left wrist looked gruesomely swollen and lumpy as his whole face was contorted in one big clenching grimace. Quickly dubbed “the Ice Skating Guy” by the folks at the ER, we were waiting to find out if The Spouse’s broken wrist (broken in two places) would require immediate surgery when The Eldest Boy said he had to go home, NOW, because he felt ill. I touched his forehead. He was burning up.

In full scramble mode, I pulled out the cell phone to find someone to watch The Eldest Boy at our house — his temp wound up being 101.3 — as I arranged for The Youngest Boy to join The Girl at the neighbors’ house. I abandoned the Ice Skating Guy and quickly drove The Eldest Boy home, got him settled in, brought The Youngest Boy to the neighbors’ house and got a lift from one of those ever-so-kind neighbors to pick up The Spouse’s car that had been left behind at the park.

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When I first started blogging in 2005, I dedicated an entry to something called, “Dysfunctional Family Bingo,” a term coined by a Brookline, MA psychologist in 2000 who was trying to come up with a funny way to cope with the inevitable madness that occurs during big holiday dinners.

I completely adore the concept.

Dysfunctional Family Bingo is like a regular Bingo game, except that the squares are filled with crazy things that could happen during a holiday dinner (there’s an ugly argument over politics, your kid breaks a family heirloom that was put in the middle of the coffee table, someone gets food poisoning, etc.). The idea is that you and your snarky friends print out the cards and secretly play along during a holiday event, like Thanksgiving. If one poor soul gets “Bingo” by unfortunately experiencing enough outrageous moments to win, that person calls the others and earns the group’s sympathy and perhaps earns a free drink the following week when you all get together to tell Thanksgiving dinner tales.

It’s a subversive way to recognize that there’s no such thing as a “perfect” holiday dinner, no matter what Martha Stewart may tell you. Everybody’s got some loony story to tell.

So in honor of Thanksgiving and the stress that sometimes accompanies big family dinners — whether or not you’re hosting — I’ve made up a 2008 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card.  If you’re expecting a particularly stressful Thanksgiving dinner this week, print it out and play along. Hopefully you won’t win.

See my 2008 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card here.

Got any Thanksgiving horror stories of your own that you want to share with the class? Please post your story (or stories) in the comments section below. And remember, in the words of the immortal High School Musical folks . . . ”We’re all in this together.”

Image credit: Meredith O’Brien/Picket Fence Post.