The Family Dinner

I heard that if a family dinner isn’t going well, you can just stand up and shout “THAT’S IT, I’M BECOMING ADOPTED” and leave with a plate of food, nobody is allowed to stop you.

It might be religion based, it might be a birthday or it could even just be random but sometime during the year a lot of us will have to sit down and have the most dreaded dinner of all…

The family dinner.

For me it’s Christmas. After a year of successfully ducking and dodging the lot of them, I’ll be forced to sit down with patronising uncles and aunts completely lacking in self-awareness.

I hate family dinners. You’re always still a child at them, no matter how old you get. Stuck at a children’s table (your knees up near your face because the table is so tiny), having macaroni or potatoes smeared into your hair by your little cousins.

Imagine your little cousin is Justin Bieber and he is the little annoying one smearing food in your hair. Now THAT would be annoying.

It gets worse once the food comes out. I’ve got a theory that my grandmother is a cannibal because it’s the only way to explain why she’s constantly shoving food down our throat.

She’s clearly fattening us up so she can feast on our delicious flesh, then maybe make a soup with the leftover bones.

When I’m not pushing half the food on my plate onto my cousins then blaming them for not eating everything, I have to keep complimenting everyone on their cooking, which is like thanking someone after they’ve sneezed on you and then punched you in the liver.

The absolute worst part though is when your relatives try to empathise with you. “So, you’re still listening to that grunge music? I heard that Friends show is very popular! I’m thinking of taking up skateboarding on the weekends because that would be, um, radical?”

Ugh. I’m just glad it’ll be another year before I have to do any of this nonsense again. Maybe I’ll get to sit at the adults table. The food’s weirder but at least it’ll give my knees a rest.

Top Tip: When visiting family members, don’t tell them about the dead pool you’re running with your cousins. They’ll have inside knowledge and will clean you out.