I apologize that I haven’t posted lately.  I’ve been away on vacation. After a couple of years of staycations, everyone in my family was excited to go away for a change. Since we couldn’t actually afford a vacation, we did what people used to do — joined our extended family on theirs.

We’ve become close to my aunt and uncle in-law over the past four years, because their daughter went to college near our home. Every time they came to visit her, they would sleep on our couch. In that time, their daughter became my daughter Allie’s favorite babysitter. The way we helped each other out gave us a whole new branch of family we hadn’t known that well before, and we started spending every thanksgiving with their whole brood.

If my uncle in-law wasn’t retired, they probably wouldn’t have stayed on our couch for those four years. If they didn’t know how financially strapped we are, they wouldn’t have invited us to join them on their vacation either. A positive byproduct of money strain is that it actually makes families rely on each other, and in doing that, it brings people—who in better times might have been more distant— together.

Okay — not every relative is going to be able to invite you to a lake house. But the point is this. As we were leaving the rental house, I saw in the guest book that Allie had written, “The best vacation I ever had!” True, it was much more than we could give her. But when I asked her what she liked best about the vacation in the car on the way home, she said, “the fact that we spent a whole week with our family.” I was surprised she hadn’t picked the beach, or the lake, or the fact that I let her drink soda a couple of times, but then I remembered that I felt the same way as a kid. The best thing about the holidays for me wasn’t  the presents. It was having a day where I was part of a larger extended family.