J3 wrote me a fabulous email story about Thanksgiving with the family.  Although it’s a pretty sucky tale, I find bits of it funny and the whole thing brilliantly related:

i was planning to make mom/grandma/j6 photo albums
w/wedding pictures, so they’d quit bugging me about
them. naturally, i thought about it too late, didn’t
finish the project, and ended up bringing down the
laptop with digital photos to look at instead. bad
mistake.mom looked at the photos once on thursday, didn’t say
anything all day friday, then sat morning made the
whole family get up at 5 to get ready to go, then
wanted to look at the photos one more time. so she
sits there going through 100 or so photos, writing
down the name of each one in a notebook (which will
probably be saved forEVER) and this takes like 2
hours, with the rest of the fam sitting around waiting
to go…then she is like, ‘now what should i do?
should i send you the list and then you take it to the
photo shop and find out the price and send me the
price and i send you the money and you send me the
pictures …OR…blah blah blah fifty different
scenarios’ and i’m like, no just tell me which ones
you want, i’ll send them to you. ‘but what about the
money?! should i a/b/c scenarios…?’
me: no, what i said before.
mom: but won’t you need the money or…blah blah?’
me: no. what. i. said. before.
mom: (blow up)CAN’T you TRY to HELP me OUT i’m TRYING
to COMMUNICATE about WHO is paying for WHAT so we
don’t have these misunderSTANDings etc etc. SOB
thanks for a great HOLiday SOB see you in another
YEAR!!! (run out of the house slam)

This has all the elements of a classic family event: Mom getting people up at insanely early hours, everyone sitting around helplessly during Mom’s agenda, Mom presenting an endless line-up of scenarios and options to an unwilling audience, Dad submitting to everything, Mom having a fit, and Grandma unable to register or admit that her daughter is mad as pants.  Awesome.