Family gatherings

When my parents-in-law were still alive, their five married offspring would meet at their parents’ house if not every week, at least every other week. When we came back to Iran in July 2007, I realised that now that both parents-in-law have passed away, the children of the family did not see each other very often. Not that they didn’t like to; but other commitments got in the way, and despite everybody’s good intentions, visits were put off: this week their children had got too much schoolwork; the following week they’d got other guests coming over; the week after sister’s husband was late from work… and so on.

The middle brother-in-law has three lovely non-identical twin girls, now just five years old. It turned out that the aunts, my sisters-in-law, sometimes did not see these little girls for as long as three months, even though they all live in the same city. Well, this was getting serious, Hossein and I thought, so we devised a plan that other families also practise. After consulting with the others, we agreed that we would all hold a re-union dinner in one of the houses every four weeks on a rotating basis. I usually draw up a provisional list of dates at the beginning of the Iranian New Year in March and distribute it to everyone. The five offspring in the family host two re-unions a year each, roughly one every six months. We leave out the last month of the Iranian year (21 Feb-20 March) because then everybody is busy spring cleaning, and we also don’t have a planned re-union during the month of Ramadan, when we might be invited elsewhere, or we may have other guests. We have also arranged to celebrate the children’s birthdays on these occasions, so the parents of the birthday child bring the cake to wherever the gathering takes place.
Sometimes the dates need to be moved or someone needs to have their date swapped with somebody else’s, but the system usually works well. After two years of this system’s operation, everybody is looking forward to the next re-union.

The recent dinner took place on 20 November at the eldest sister-in-law’s house, when we celebrated the fourteenth birthday of the younger sister-in-law’s daughter. The next occasion will be on New Year’s day (1 January) at our house.