For the first time in the fifteen years I’ve been with Scott, the Merriman family Christmas went to hell in a handbag. Best. Christmas. Ever. No, wait! Don’t go away.  It was awful for some! But it slowed things down a bit for the rest of us and created some unique opportunities.

Every year is a winter family reunion. We see all of Scott’s sisters, even though they are scattered around the country. (The few years Susan didn’t come, she was living in a boat in the Bahamas. It would be very hard to hold that against her.)

We’ve grown to a crowd of twenty, and we descend upon go to his oldest sister’s house for a gigantically long weekend.… Read the rest