Parenting Guru: One Hot Family Tradition

Every family has traditions-whether it's Friday night pizza or helping at a soup kitchen, we all have something we love to do with our families.

Well, every family except mine, of course.

Oh, don't get me wrong. My husband, teenage son and I enjoy our summer movie nights, where we lounge in the backyard watching DVDs and try to keep the dogs from scarfing down popcorn. In fact, we're good on those traditions. It's the holiday ones we don't handle well.

photo © Andrejs Pidjass

We've never met a holiday we couldn't kill-or at least harm to the extent that we dread the holidays. Take the Mother's Day I caught my mother's kitchen on fire. Or the Thanksgiving the dog ate turkey drippings and threw up on our new carpet-for three days.

But a funny thing happened once we took stock of our holiday disasters. We realized that we were trying too hard to be the perfect family, to have the perfect holiday traditions. So we made the holidays about our friends, our extended family and us. And celebrating with people we love became our favorite tradition of all time.

Although, we still keep a fire extinguisher handy. Just in case.