Let me start off by saying this: I have the greatest family in the world. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion that their family is the best, but they're wrong. What makes my family unique though is the sheer wildness that ensues whenever we get together. Bear with me, I'll explain what goes down on a typical holiday.

My personal family typically hosts many of the holiday gatherings because of my mother's dedication to pleasing others and pure enjoyment from feeding copious amounts of people. Therefore, preparation begins hours, days, weeks in advance. That means tip toeing around mom and literally grinding the dirt off of your shoes before you enter the house because heaven forbid a speck of mud smaller than a fruit fly enter the home. Your home being the meeting place of the family also means waking up before the sun in order to continue to clean things around the house that have already been cleaned three times. Then, the family arrives.

This is where the day gets interesting. Suddenly the quiet house is packed to the brim with people talking and laughing. I don't mean talking in normal voices though, I mean full on screaming. I'd say at a higher decibel level than an airplane taking off, like breaking mach 5 business here. An aunt is screaming at a cousin across the room, the dogs are barking, kids are running laps around the dinner table, and someone is in the living room turning the TV up to max volume in order to hear over the cacophony. Then, there stands me.

I'm sitting in the middle of the house observing this entire event. The kitchen counter looks like an Italian restaurant threw up all over it even though it's Thanksgiving. Someone just told an extremely TMI joke too loud and as a result a young child became scarred for life. I'm standing back and watching them all clean the bottles on the bar dry and inhaling more food than I even thought possible for one person to eat. But as I stand there amidst this insane, deafening, inappropriate and highly energetic family I realize wow, these people rock. Who said normal is fun, anyway? Yeah, no one. So ditch those proper clothes, throw on some sweatpants and head over to my family's holiday celebration, because half of our visitors don't even belong to our family anyway.