The best thing about my wife's family might surprise you (but shouldn't)

There's many things I love about the family that I have married into. 

  • Their absolute acceptance of me despite our many differences
  • Their support and encouragement of my teaching, writing, and performing career 
  • Their unbridled love for my children

There are also some quirky aspects of the family that I have grown to adore.

  • Their insistence of a full account of every one of my medical or proposed medical procedures (and their subsequent demands for a fourth opinion).
  • Their reverence for the morning-after-the-visit breakfast of bagels and locks (necessitating an overnight stay when I could've just as easily driven home the night before).   
  • Their need for gifts to be opened as absolutely soon as possible (once before I even removed my coat).

But the thing that appreciate about them most is perhaps this:

No one in my wife's family has ever proposed that we run a 5K on a holiday.

No Turkey Trots. No Ugly Sweater Runs. No Snowflake Shuffles. No Jingle Bell Jogs. No "Ringing in the New Year" Runs.   

I can't begin to imagine the agony and ruination of the poor soul who marries into a family who thinks that they best way to spend a Thanksgiving or Christmas or New Year's Day morning is to drag their asses to some arbitrary starting line in the freezing cold to run alongside a bunch of equally brain damaged lunatics.

Sometimes it's the little things that matter most.