Congratulations. Life is normal again.

The Holidays have always had a certain grounding aspect to them. It's the time when family gets together and you think, "maybe this will be the year they tell me I was adopted." But each season comes and goes and no one starts a conversation with the words, "I think you're old enough to know" and so you have to accept the fact that dear Aunt Agnes is swimming laps in your gene pool. I always find it a little amusing and a bit comforting as well. It's nice to come in for a landing when you live in a world in which your customer service representative lives three continents away.

It seems every family has that aunt or uncle that doesn't seem to be riding the same wavelength as everyone else. Of course they are very dear people but finding a thread of commonality can be an insurmountable task. It usually just comes back to food. "The cheesy broccoli sure is cheesy this year. I like cheese. Do you like cheese? Yeah, me too." I don't think we have to worry about food being taken out of the Christmas picture. Someone is out there making armies of Christmas cookies with reckless abandon. For three weeks out of the year the chocolate chip cookie takes a back seat to the gingerbread man (or woman) and any other cookie cutter shape that you had sitting in your junk drawer. And you can't forget the ham. Someone decided that five pounds of ham per person was a nice round number. There must be a quota of ham consumption that we fall miserably short of each year. I assume if we didn't have Christmas the ham police would show up at your door on December 31st and tell you it's time to pay the piper.

And the bars. Yes, the bars. Pans upon pans of sugary treats baked in a rectangle. I'm convinced that Christmas could go on for weeks and the pans of bars would magically appear in an endless supply. I keep looking in the back yard expecting to see a storage unit parked in front of the door with lines of people carrying pans of bars stacked five high. In the midst of all these bars there is always that one pan that no one seems to touch. It is usually a combination of two things that shouldn't go together. If you dig deep enough you'll probably find a vegetable lurking somewhere under the surface. No one wants to hurt Aunt so-and-so's feelings so we all make an excuse as to why we pass over that pan of wonder that even the dog seems to avoid. "I'd love to try some but zucchini and pineapple make my legs go numb", or something like that. And it just sits there like an orphan who never found a home for Christmas. But strangely enough if Christmas rolled around and the alien bars never made an appearance I would probably miss them more than all my favorite Christmas foods put together. Although I've never tasted them they bring me in for a landing and that's what is so great about going home to family. So now I'll spend the next twelve months hoping that Aunt so-and-so remembers to put her lack of culinary skills to use. Maybe next year I'll tell her how much I appreciate those horrible bars that even the dog seems to be afraid of.