Picket Fence Post

How was your Thanksgiving celebration? Fill in any of the Dysfunctional Family Bingo card squares? Hopefully not. I was happy to have gone a weekend without filling in a square. (I received at least one sarcastic comment about my Dysfunctional Bingo project from a family member who asked, “Which one did I inspire?” I declined to answer.)

All in all, I considered our Thanksgiving holiday week to have been a success because (I’ve been keeping my standards mighty low these days, a technique that has, thus far, worked for me):

– There were no arguments during Thanksgiving dinner, with the exception of a mild disagreement about the rules of the odious Yankee Swap of which I was not a participant.

– No one contracted food poisoning or the swine flu or the plague or mad cow disease (though that seems like such a dated ailment now, doesn’t it?).

– No one got into an accident or ran over anyone’s mailbox with their vehicle or with an errant Tiger Woods-mobile.

– The three Picket Fence Post children have all their limbs and health intact, though they did bicker and fight with one another so much that, at one point, I gave myself a ”Time Out” and fled to my bedroom so I wouldn’t have to listen to them squabble.

– My sisters-in-law, who ventured out at midnight on Black Friday to shop, were not trampled to death.

As for the remainder of the Thanksgiving holiday: The day after Thanksgiving, the Picket Fence Post family and the Picket Fence Post  grandparents decided to brave the rain (a Nor’easter had been predicted but never happened) in order to see a balloon parade which seemed a bit, oh, what’s the word, uh, underwhelming, yeah, underwhelming is the right word for watching semi-inflated balloons being dragged down city streets. You couldn’t even see The Cat in the Hat’s face from where we were standing because it was slumping over as if the feline had had a rough Thanksgiving night at the pub. But at least the kids got to see Santa after the brief parade concluded and tell the big guy what they want for Christmas. (When I heard that The Girl asked Santa for an iPhone, I started banging my head against a wall.)

During the weekend, I celebrated Thanksgiving by partaking of another all-American tradition: I took the iPhone Girl Wanna-Be and a friend of hers to see a movie about a love triangle between a human, a vampire and a werewolf. (For those who’ve been living under a rock, I’m talking about the new installment of the Twilight series, New Moon. I wrote a column about why women my age are so obsessed with the series here.) I also got the chance to do a whole mess of reading.

Now that it’s the Monday after Thanksgiving (and the kids have another day off from school), I’ve already been asked how my Christmas shopping is going . . . an inquiry at which I scoffed. “Christmas shopping? I haven’t even thought about it yet.” That was kind of untrue, as I did ask the children to write Christmas lists so that The Spouse and I can start thinking about gifts, but we haven’t done anything about it yet beyond the contemplation point.

About the headless Pilgrim above: That’s the result of the kids playing in the dining room and knocking over the male Pilgrim that was decorating my table. I’ll play “Taps” for him a little later this afternoon.

For years I’ve been capitalizing on a  concept originally created by a Brookline psychologist in 2000 as a tool with which to deal with familial tension during holiday gatherings: Dysfunctional Family Bingo.

Dysfunctional Family Bingo is like a regular Bingo game except that the squares on the Bingo card are filled with crazy incidents that could plausibly happen during a holiday dinner like Thanksgiving or Christmas. But unlike regular Bingo, believe me, this is not a game you want to win, at least not unless you’ve had your Zoloft prescription filled recently. If you actually are able to fill out five squares in a row to get Bingo, well, I feel for you my friend; you’ve clearly endured an oddball holiday gathering. Perhaps you should write a best selling memoir about it.

But for most of the rest of us, hopefully, reading through the 2009 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card will be a subversive, snarky way to recognize that there’s no such thing as a “perfect” holiday dinner and that everybody’s family is a tad off-kilter.

So, for your reading pleasure, I introduce my 2009 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card. (Go to this link to see the card.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

For the past few years I’ve addressed the issue of holiday stress – particularly when you gather multiple generations together for a high-pressure holiday dinner — by creating Dysfunctional Family Bingo cards. I take awkward-but-realistic scenarios that might occur during (before or after) your family’s Thanksgiving dinner and place each one into a box on a BINGO card and pray that no one checks off enough boxes to actually win.

In some twisted way, writing up all of these scenarios amuses me and serves as a reminder that EVERYONE experiences a bit of familial dysfunction during holiday dinners so we may as well just find the humor in them. (For the full history of Dysfunctional Family Bingo, go here.)

What kinds of scenarios am I talking about? For the past couple years, I’ve used a few of my own holiday dinner experiences (though there’s no way I’m ‘fessing up which ones are autobiographical) as well as some which my friends have shared with me in order to fill out each box on the Bingo card. Here are a few from my 2008 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card:

– Some older children at the gathering taught your impressionable young child how to spit, the glory of purple nurples and new vocabulary words like the “F” word.

– Your mother suggests that you join her in starting a diet in the new year, noting that your pants are getting “a bit snug” and asks you if you’ve ever heard of the term “muffin top.”

– It gets heated when several members of the family cannot agree on the best, fastest route to take from this location to the mall.

– A male relative drags you outside and points out everything that’s wrong with your house, from the roof and gutters, to the window screens and the chimney.

– Maxi pads, whose box you had tucked away in a bathroom cabinet, were taken out by a young nephew who decided to remove the paper strips on the back and stick them all over the bathroom wall in a random pattern.

This year, I’m going to ask you, my smart and witty Picket Fence Post readers, to please contribute YOUR OWN oddball/dysfunctional family holiday dinner scenarios which could happen (or have happened) during the celebration of Thanksgiving. I’ll use reader suggestions along with my own to create my 2009 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card. Please e-mail me your contribution (everybody’s got at least one amusing scenario) — to meredithobrien@hotmail.com — no later than noon on Monday, November 23.

 The best four contributions (as determined by me) will earn their creators an autographed and personalized copy of my collection of humor/parenting columns, Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum, where the motto is, “Parenting is best done with a hearty sense of humor.”  Looking forward to reading your e-mails!

Image credit: AP.

The Picket Fence Post family survived two Thanksgiving dinners this past weekend and managed to fill two squares on the Dysfunctional Family Bingo card . . . though I’m not sayin’ which two because my loving family members read this blog.

*waving, ‘hi’ to family*

The day after Thanksgiving I (at my parents’ house where the kids watched about 47 hours of TV), we attended a Christmas parade featuring giant balloons (Cat-in-the-Hat, Strawberry Shortcake, etc.) and a few street cleaners which were, no lie, part of the procession. The kids’ favorite part, I suspect, was gathering the pieces of candy which were hurled in their general direction by parade participants. Given that two out of the three kids didn’t really eat much at Thanksgiving dinner — unlike their parents who stuffed themselves –they must’ve been hungry.

As soon as the parade concluded, we went inside the mall along the parade route and got in line to visit Santa. Panic ensued when the skeptical Eldest Boy told me, “I’m not going to see him. He’s not the real Santa. I’m going to write [the real] Santa a letter.” And the kid refused to get in line.

I was concerned that his move would taint the experience of his siblings and prompt a crisis of Christmas faith, but The Girl and The Youngest Boy were distracted by the fact that they didn’t know exactly what they want for Christmas (making Christmas shopping vexing!) and didn’t know what to say to the big guy in red. (The Spouse and I suggested that they tell him they’ll send him a letter with a specific request later.)

(more…)

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.