Holidays in most families are a big deal. Some families prefer to do holidays intimately with the exclusion of extended family. However, when you come from a large family that all live within 15 minutes of each other you can throw small family holidays out the door.
The holidays are always a spectacle when you come from a large family. I can attest that there is at least two holiday's out of the entire year where my family has some big fancy event. Props to my aunts who have some wicked planning skills. Every year our Easter has a theme, one year it was Willy Wonka and another it was Alice in Wonderland. Planning for this usually starts in the summer and tends to attract parts of our New York family.
All the other holidays that are not apart of these big planned out events with people bringing specific foods, we try to spend with our individual families. In my experience that never really happens. Either the day before or day of someone calls somebody else and all of sudden you're all at the same house eating pizza and watching movies.
Besides the planning of events, when you've got a big family arguing is almost a given when it comes to the holidays. It's not a bad thing and most of us has the same political views but even when you all have the same basis of political ideas there is still room for discussion. This means a lot of loud discussion possibly more like a heated debate with both sides thinking the other is wrong.
At some point in the night there is also dancing. I don't really understand why. It just kind of happens. There will be music playing in the background and all of a sudden my cousins got his fat suit on doing some weird dance and everyone is joining in.
Lastly there is always too much food. It doesn't matter if there is 15 of us or 30 of us, you're going home with left overs. It's one of the perks of living in a large family that also happens to be Italian, you never have to worry about going hungry.
