I’m not going home to Nova Scotia for Christmas this year, as I normally would. When I tell people this their first reaction is usually, “Oh, don’t want to deal with all the family drama, eh?”

Given how often I’ve heard it in the last month, and the number of times I’ve heard stories about such family drama, I think I must have a fairly abnormal family. There’s no drama. We don’t fight. We don’t have feuds, or get snippy, or form alliances, or try to manipulate each other. In fact, even since I grew out of the gimmetoys-gimmetoys-gimmetoys phase (if my dad were reading this he’d say, “What, you mean two years ago?”, ’cause that’s just how he rolls humour-wise) spending time with my family has been the best thing about Christmas.

I laugh more, and feel more relaxed, with my brothers and parents (especially when we’re on the farm) than I do with anyone else, except Nellie probably. That quiet time, punctuated with games of skill (read: cribbage and Trivial Pursuit), musical interludes (usually my father, brother or I fighting trying to convince my mother we should listen to delta blues instead of Christmas carols) and episodes of utter silliness (my brothers and I speak some kind of special language when we get going and occasionally fall on the floor laughing) is about as close to blissful meditation as I get.

And this isn’t just my immediate family either: our extended family on my dad’s side gets together every Boxing Day and it’s equally fun and laid back. Of course, they’re all like my dad…not a lot of high-strung people amongst the Dickinsons.

One of the reasons we could stomach the idea of not going back to NS this year is because we just spent time with my family in France (having one of the best times of our lives, I might add, so that’d be hard to top so soon after) and Nellie’ll have a family visit in about a month, so we won’t have been away from them for too long. There’s a couple of other reasons why we decided to stay in Toronto, but the idea of avoiding family drama never even crossed my mind. The only drama at all will be not seeing them.

[tags]family drama[/tags]