It’s been a week and a half since Christmas and my mom has successfully hit every after Christmas sale east of the Mississippi. 2016 was a weird and semi-tragic year chalk full of celebrity deaths, political nonsense, and memes…. So many memes. Christmas day did not disappoint as it was, in accordance with the rest of the year, a crazy, messy, emotionally charged day for my family. If I was blunt I would call it a sh*t show. Oh, wait, I am blunt. It was a sh*t show.

I’d love to go into detail about the weird (and entertaining) events of this year’s Christmas, but I love and respect my nana too much to dare make that public. So I’m here to tell you what I took away from the chaos of those 24 hours instead – the general idea of what family is and the value of “us."

It has come to my attention that even though my family was messy bunch on Christmas (drunk grandparents, an engagement, typical in-law bickering, a stomach bug, then another stomach bug, Dan and Don, and every insulting uncle in between) family is family.

At some point in the late evening on December 25^th, I realized that the seemingly “crazy” people that I ate gingerbread cookies with that night were some variation of me. From my unplanned matching outfit with my mom to the blood running through our veins, the similarities between my family members and I were and are apparent. My cousins and I all came from our parents who came from their parents who came from somewhere in Western Europe and probably owned slaves in America in 1850… not the point. The point is, I have been telling the story of my Christmas day to my friends as if I was not a part of it because the drama was not centered around myself individually. But that is not true.

I am beginning to understand that one cannot deny the collective fate of themselves and their relatives due to these shared moments.

I understood this most recently when watching the new NBC show called “This is Us." A middle aged uncle is trying to explain to his young nieces about family, death, and love: All those big concepts and ideas. He describes family as having this undeniably interconnected story even if, individually, family members follow their own paths. He explains that these stories can still live after family members have died and how those peoples’ impacts are what keep families together.

The clip is worth watching, but make sure you have tissues around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh-Tof_QxKU&index=20&list=PLBXjFjRm_ReuqdK_23pcr9GFdLqQ0f6vL

All in all, after this year’s Christmas fiasco and after watching “This is Us, I’ve understood better than ever that yes, families can be dysfunctional and messy, but each person is constantly adding to this collective and beautiful story even if it seems uncomfortable, anxiety-inducing, and downright painful in the moment.

This year, my family’s story culminated in a day full of grief, love, marriage, death, pain, anger, rebirth, forgiveness, and a lot of bacon wrapped appetizers. But those moments on Christmas this year are not just part of a crazy story that I will tell at parties for years to come. These moments are and always will be a part of us.

This is us.