Family Reunions

My family has 2 family reunions every year. One is Christmas themed and is taking place in a few days (missing it) and one takes place in the summer in Kite, Georgia. That summertime one hits the nail on the head with every, single, white-family-from-the-south family reunion stereotype.

Competition

I wish we were the cool family that had “organized sports” with t-shirts at our family reunions, and that would be our healthy outlet for the bitter sibling rivalries that have gone on for the better part of 6 decades. We have nothing of the sort. So instead we have our own decathlon-esque style of being competitive.

  

Round 1: All the moms sit around and compete-brag on their kids. “Oh your son got a full scholarship to college? My daughter did too AND she’s going to be joining the swim team”. The instrumentals for the song “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better” plays subtlety in the background during this round.

Round 2: The displays of talent. Naturally every child is a snowflake in my family, and super special. This must be paraded around. Musical performances were always a must, and the cousins would bring their instruments to play – we had flutes, I played the piano, my cousin brought his bassoon one year. A bassoon. Like some weird twist between the von Trapp family and the movie Deliverance.

Round 3: “Games”. For some reason there is always a ping pong table and a pool table at these events. Even as children, these games got fiery. One time when we were playing pool my cousin must have done something really awful, I don’t recall, but I do know that the only legitimate move for me was to hit him upside the head with my pool stick. And to this day I stand by that move.

The Setting

The only proper way to have a family reunion is to A. Have it in a town that no one in the entire state has ever heard of and B. Have it when it is eleventy banillion degrees outside. You know how you get to Kite, Georgia? You go to Swainsboro, and you look at which direction from Swainsboro looks like it has the highest amount of nothing happening, and head in that direction for 30 minutes.

Also please act like the house has air conditioning. Instead, there are just several industrial sized box fans scattered about the lawn for people to catch a breeze. How we managed to procure a dozen 4-foot tall box fans but we couldn’t just maybe get a window AC unit is beside the point. If you need me at these events, I will be standing within 2 millimeters of the front of one of these fans.

There is also a plastic baby pool that has been inexplicably filled up and the kids can just stew in the lukewarm cess pool that is a forgotten baby pool in Kite, Georgia. One year when I was 12 I had brought my swimsuit for this exact purpose in hopes it could cure the pain that is a South Georgia summer. A child at this event (unknown who he is. Are we related? WHO ARE YOU!?) actually serenaded me with the song “My Girl” when he saw me in my swimsuit.

The Food

If anything is going to happen at a family reunion it’s that everyone is going to play real fast and real loose with the word “salad”. The buffet table is just a smorgasbord of all the different ways you can combine mayonnaise with other condiments, add a starch, and call it a day. Rules of the salads are as follows:

1  1.      You must use mayonnaise
    2.      You may not use an actual vegetable

    3.      Russian-roulette style, one of the salads needs to have been left out of refrigeration too long. You will not know which it is. You will get food poisoning from this salad.

And everyone knows that the table is not complete without 4 bags of Sunbeam Yeast Rolls, just sitting in the bag, and everyone reaches their hands in and rips off 3-4 squares of bread to sop up the “salad” with. Hearty.