Many of my earliest memories are hanging out with my family. We try to get together often celebrating not only Christmas and Thanksgiving, but Mother's Day, Easter, 4th of July, and birthdays. Because of the closeness that my mom has had with her siblings, I've been fortunate enough to stay close to my cousins as well. Not everyone gets this chance, and it's something I'm pretty grateful for.

My cousin Amber was always the one I was closest with growing up. There's a larger age gap between my other cousins and I so I was usually considered one of the "little cousins" and stuck closest to Amber. I still remember going to my grandma's house and receiving cookies with green icing as a snack while we completed the same 4 or 5 puzzles in her back room where we convened every Tuesday. The land my grandma lived on was pretty big to my small mind and we would spend the evenings "exploring" the paths that ran behind the farmhouse as well as coming back covered in burrs.

My cousins Sarah, Austin, and Mariah are the older cousins in the family. There's at least a four-year gap between us because when I started college they were already long gone. While the age gap may have delayed our relationship from forming, I'm glad that I'm close enough to them now to be in group chats and go on ice cream runs together to escape from family gatherings. They may have used to run away from me so that I didn't hang out with them when I was little, but I won't hold it against them now.

Currently, all of the cousins are rather spread apart during the year. I'm usually in Indy at school, Amber lives and works in Portland, Austin lives in Decatur but travels for his construction job (I like to think that one day he will single-handedly fix the pothole problem of Indy for me), Mariah is in the Marines, and Sarah works somewhere in northern Indiana for a store (I'm a little vague on where she actually is or what she's doing, but I know she's alive).

The relationships that we formed at grandma and grandpa's farmhouse when we were growing up, and now my parent's house for holidays, is one that I'm grateful for. A lot of my friends from school aren't close enough to their cousins that they'll plan a cookout for 5 in the morning where they roast one s'more than promptly fall asleep. We may not have the most exciting of adventures, but we do make an effort to see each other and that's what matters.

I may not see all of you guys until the next family gathering (which is Thanksgiving I think? Unless we get together for Labor Day), but know that I'm really happy that you're more than just the people I see for an hour on Christmas. I'm grateful that I'm close to my family, and it's a tradition that I hope I'm able to carry on with my future hypothetical children as well.