Family Togetherness on Your Terms

Okay, so we haven’t even gotten to Halloween yet…but you’d better believe the holidays are lurking just around the corner, waiting to jump out and scare you half to death. They’ll be here before we know it: the shopping, the wrapping, the cooking, the crafting — and, of course, the traveling. For those of us with faraway relatives, Christmas cheer spreads not only through the house, but clear across the country.

Every Thanksgiving, my family flies to Arkansas to spend a few days with my husband’s family. The first couple of hours are pleasant, and after that there’s a thin line between love and tolerance…and an even thinner line between tolerance and climbing out the window. I’d pretty much resigned myself to another week of sleeping in my husband’s childhood bedroom, and then I saw this Travelocity deal on Mamasource.

I snatched up the half-priced voucher quicker than I could rattle off that old joke about what house guests and fish have in common. I figure I’m doing my family—and the in-laws—a favor by not stinking up their house.

Travelocity is pretty much a household name when it comes to travel discounts, so I didn’t even think twice about grabbing this gift card. Since it’s redeemable at 55,000 participating hotels around the world, I knew I’d have no trouble booking our trip. I just got on their website, picked our destination, entered the dates, and they gave me an instant list of all available hotels.

Now that we’ll have our own hotel room right down the street from my in-laws’ house, I’m actually excited about Thanksgiving instead of seeing it as just another obligation to get through. Because just like turkey and cranberries, family togetherness is best in moderation.

Melissa Rudy is a Cincinnati-based freelance writer and mother of three girls. When she’s not stringing together Words by Melissa, she’s running, carpooling, or hiding in her closet with a novel.