Hysterical Christmas

I suppose it is a matter of opinion "and timing" whether you consider something like this "Funny" or "Scary". But most of us in families have to deal with one or more aspects of this no matter where we live if we are in a family. As husband and father I see my job around Christmas as being calm and resolute so I can help everyone have a good time, while at the same time "putting out fires", in other words preventing major confrontations between relatives and friends. And in my family my primary job I find is to put up with a wife who has always been an overachiever since before she was valedictorian of her private prep school in the 1970s. So, since she now has two bachelor's degrees and an MBA and is in her 50s while I am 63, she finds it now emotionally and physically much harder to deal with a "normal Christmas" than she once did. So, the pressures build up and my normal laid back calm demeanor gets ruffled here and there as she starts to "go ballistic" from all the pressures.

But then, even I had to laugh as my 15 year old daughter told us that she thought she was a more submissive personality as things got more heated between members of the family. This made the rest of us laugh at her response because then my wife said, "There are only dominant members of this family. There are no submissives in this family" to our daughter. I saw this kind of both horrific and yet happy look  in my 15 year olds realization that she was considered to be a "dominant" personally too, just like the rest of us. Merry Christmas to me.

The real trick when you have all dominant personalities in a family is to find ways to agree on one or more things. Otherwise, eventually that "all dominant personality family" is going to blow apart. So, emphasizing what we agree on rather than emphasizing what we don't agree on is how families like ours stay happy and together through anything.