When Kids Come Back Home as Guests

It feels weird that this is my first holiday season when my kids come back home as guests. No matter where my mind is during the day, holiday gifts shopping or meeting with a client, at the end of each day all my thoughts somehow get squeezed into only one funnel – my kids. This is for twenty-five years and two hundred and ten days since the first one was born. Now, when they are not living at home I still feel like I am a nest keeper rather than an empty-nester. It is just a different kind of nest. This Holiday season is my first one when kids are coming home as guests. It feels weird. What should I cook? What should I do to make it special? 

There were  thousands of meals cooked through the years, from the time when they were toothless, helpless noisy rug rats to gourmet toothy stakes for graduations. But my favorite are those in the kitchen with orange juice stains over the homework and beans glued to school projects. The key to their souls was always getting involved and in touch with their dreams and challenges and share my own. Now, when they are grown up I still think that there is no better place in the world than your own kitchen table.

The same is with holiday cooking. Getting your family involved in the holiday’s cooking can be quite therapeutic. For example, chopping something like carrots together for Thanksgiving meal is scientifically proven (I am lying) to help frustration about that new mean boss. Who knows, maybe by the time all the vegetables are chopped for the stuffing your daughter will feel less stressed about facing the bitchy boss Monday morning. At the same time, talking about her latest love fling is much more fun while making chocolate cookies.

Then, when everyone gathers around the table it does not matter that much if you have amazing table decorations from Pottery Barn (even though it can also be lovely). What matters is the intensity of familiar smells, sounds, and voices multiplied by bits and pieces of interrupted stories, some new, others so predictable that after you hear two words you know the end with unmistakable certainty. You put up the music in the background and then everyone starts talking at the same time and it looks like nobody listens to each other but at the same time everyone listens to all. There is something quite irreplaceable about bitter-sweet holiday chaos that only families share.

I do not like to force questions like, “So, tell me, Tommy, what are you thankful for?” I believe that Tommy will tell you one way or another if the time is right. I think it is a good idea for a hostess – the nest keeper to be really chatty and gently take charge. For example, if you want your guests to share their thoughts about the past year and what they were grateful for, you can start talking about someone else’s story that you read in the paper or watched on the news and then switch it to yourself. Perhaps, other people will follow and open up more.

For more fun, you can get your guests involved a week before they come.  For example, you can call a younger mom of the family and have her suggest different games to play with younger kids. Be real, most likely she will not show up dressed as a clown and provide professional level entertainment for two hours. However, she might support you spark up a game or two at the party if she knows what you are up to.  At least, she will know in advance instead of being put on the spot. By the way, the grown-up children under the age of eighty-five are usually enjoying kids’ games just as much.

Yes, we all sometimes get carried away with pretty things, such as holiday gifts, decorations, impossible recopies from famous chefs and all the glitter. But it is always something invisible that is on the seventh sense level that makes us happy, and that is the thing called LOVE that comes from family and friends.

So, this Thanksgiving I decided to try to be just my old self and not really do anything other than what I would usually do when my kids were living at home. I will just enjoy them, accept them and all the changes that come with age and growing up.

Enjoy your holidays, love yourself and others and make this holiday really special. Of course, you know by now that your thoughts are super important to me to share them here. I would love that.

Please post your questions here below. I’ll be happy to help you!