Family Reunions. Double the family, double the...not fun.

Every five years or so, usually in the summertime, some nutso aunt sees it customary to host a Family Reunion, where all of your extended family gather for an extended weekend. So to prepare you for the 1 in 5 chance that you must endure one of these abominable experiences, jump on in.

Now, everyone getting together may sound amazing in concept, but has the potential to go horribly awry in practice. The Family Reunion only happens once every five years for a reason. It's like the Family Olympics.  Even though the Olympics only happen every four years.

Look, just forget about the Olympics, okay?

The point is, you train for years to get to the point where you can be the best that you can be, so that when you see that hot second cousin of yours, even though you would never consummate your lust, you can make them seriously rationalize in their heads that making out with a second cousin wouldn't be nearly as bad as making out with a first cousin.

When we were younger, Family Reunions were great! They provided us the opportunity to bond with our cousins and meet that second cousin that one day we would have a totally inappropriate, but nonetheless hot, crush on. It was good, clean family fun.

Now that everyone's grown, but not old enough to have kids, and all the cousins are good friends and of drinking age, oh my God, do people get wasted.

Especially Nana.

And that's okay.

Yes, I just said it's okay to get wasted with family, which goes against my previous teachings, (Previous Teachings) but --listen carefully-- Family Reunions involve enough people and enough stress, that it would be wrong not to drink.

Unless you're an alcoholic. Then you most definitely should not drink. However, drinking adds to the experience.

For example, when your brother's perfect wife is taking pictures with her perfect kids, who are all wearing perfectly matching plaid outfits, you can act like you're at one of those interactive Sound of Music screenings where you get to drink and yell at the film. You can demand they all sing "So Long, Farewell", and when the children look confused and a bit frightened, and your brother gently suggests that you stop drinking, you can get up and start sprinting and pretending you're running to Switzerland.

Now to me, that's hilarious, only because The Sound of Music was one of my mother's favorite videos, and I watched it enough as a child that I have it memorized. To you, probably not so much. Brush up on your Julie Andrews days of yore, then we'll talk.

If you weren't drunk, you might not think it's amusing when your eighty-four-year-old uncle hits on your twenty-two-year-old daughter. With the benefits of alcohol, however, you find him humorously reminiscent. It sort-of reminds  you of when he hit on you when you were twenty-two, but it was a little more serious because he was only fifty-four and now he can blame it on Maker's Mark and being senile. No matter. It's nostalgic to see your little girl has grown up so fast. Your daughter, however, does not find this incident particularly funny or sentimental. But when her second cousin sees her great-uncle hitting on her, maybe he'll get jealous, so she'll deal with it.

God. What drives me extra banana sandwich is when you get that great-aunt that is asking all about what you're doing in life, but they ask your parents instead of you.

  I can field all sorts of questions from aunts, uncles, second aunts, third uncles twice removed, great aunts about what I'm doing with my life by myself.

This should be like a hay day for parents, cause they don't have to be constantly giving updates on their children. If someone asks how I'm doing, Mom and Dad, point to my general direction to where I'm smoking pot in a field, and go back to sipping your margarita.