Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Feeling Stressed Out by the Prospect of Thanksgiving Dinner? Play Dysfunctional Family Bingo

If you're a person who's concerned about what odd/uncomfortable/upsetting/infuriating thing might occur during your Thanksgiving celebration with your family, then you might want to consider taking a peek at my 2009 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card which I've posted on my other blog. It's a Bingo card whose squares are filled with weird/irritating events that could plausibly occur during your family's celebration of gratitude. It's not a Bingo game that you actually want to win, though, unless you're into that sort of self-torture thing.

It's meant to be a humorous albeit snarky way to remember that nobody actually has perfect Bree Van de Kamp Hodge/Martha Stewart holiday dinners with family.

The New York Times obliquely referenced Dysfunctional Family Bingo -- a concept created by a Massachusetts psychologist in 2000 -- in its Science section today in an article entitled, "Food, Kin and Tension at Thanksgiving." Some of the anecdotes mentioned in the story could've made for good entries for my Dysfunctional Family Bingo card, including this one:

"[The director of a university-based eating disorders program] told the story of a patient whose mother scolded her for not eating her homemade cookies. 'You don't like my cookies?' she asked. As a result, the daughter relented and took a cookie. But when she then reached for a second, her mother scolded her again. 'Do you really think you need another one?' she asked her."

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