Quote of the Day (Lillian Stone, on Family Relations at Christmastime)

“Your extended family includes grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. It also includes Enzo, your cousin's cousin's cousin, who owns the Italian place down the street and proudly displays a signed photo of Bernadette Peters above the cash register. Every time you walk by with your dog, he gives you a wink and screams, ‘Proud home of preferred manicotti of Bernadette Peters!’ Enzo, too, is family.”— Humor writer and journalist Lillian Stone, “Shouts and Murmurs: Obscure Familial Relations, Explained for the Holidays,” The New Yorker, Dec. 9, 2024

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Carol Burnett Show,’ As a Visiting Friend Disrupts Mama’s Family)

Thelma "Mama" Harper [played by Vicki Lawrence]: “It is people like her that are causing the downfall of this whole country. If I was your mother...”

Midge Gibson [played by Joanne Woodward, pictured right]: [interrupting] “Well, you are not my mother, Mrs. Harper, so I have no emotional objection to punching you right in the nose!”

Mama: “Are you going to let her talk to me like that, Eunice?”

Eunice Higgins [played by Carol Burnett, left]: “Go, go, go.”

Midge: “Now I have made many mistakes in my life, but I have never been deliberately malicious and cruel and if you're an example of decency, sister, thank God I'm indecent and you…”

[referring to and pointing at Ed, Eunice's husband]

Midge: “... you weren't so high and mighty in high school when you…you were in the back seat of that convertible with me on that double date with Gigi and—and—and you practically tore off my best sweater!”

Eunice: “Oh, Ed!”

Midge: “Yeah! I finally got away and after that, he ran after Gigi! Jim had to throw him out of the car! Oh, Eunice, I'm sorry.”

Eunice: “Oh, shoot. Who cares? I'm just surprised he ever had that much energy.”— The Carol Burnett Show, Season 9, Episode 21, “The Family” sketch, original air date Feb. 14, 1976, directed by Dave Powers

Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, on Traveling With a Baby)

“There is much to be said for those who maintain that rather should the race be allowed to die out than that babies should be taken from place to place along our national arteries of traffic. On the other hand, there are moments when babies are asleep. (Oh, yes, there are. There must be.) But it is practically a straight run of ten or a dozen hours for your child of four. You may have a little trouble in getting the infant to doze off, especially as the train newsboy waits crouching in the vestibule until he sees signs of slumber on the child's face and then rushes in to yell, ‘Copy of Life, out today!’ right by its pink, shell-like ear. But after it is asleep, your troubles are over except for wondering how you can shift your ossifying arm to a new position without disturbing its precious burden.”— American humorist Robert Benchley (1889-1945), “Kiddie-Kar Travel,” in Pluck and Luck (1925)

Okay, the passage of nearly 100 years means that, more likely than not, families will be taking planes instead of trains—and the barking newsboy, with his get-up-and-go energy and entrepreneurial vigor, is a thing of the post.

But, with school out and the summer travel season upon us again (and the fear of COVID receding, though not yet entirely gone), parents (including two I can think of) are about to experience something like the sheer terror that Benchley is talking about.

Funny how that “ossifying arm” keeps being passed along from generation to generation…

Quote of the Day (Erma Bombeck, on Family and ‘The Common Thread That Bound Us All Together’)

“The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.” —American humorist Erma Bombeck (1927-1996), Family: The Ties That Bind…and Gag! (1976)

She is known best for the humor she brought to her syndicated newspaper column over three decades and to her Good Morning America TV segments for 11 years in the Seventies and Eighties. But Erma Bombeck—who died 25 years ago today of complications from a kidney transplant—sought, at the most basic level, to convey the truth of domestic life she lived as wife and mother, as seen in the above quote.

At the time of her passing, I’m sure many readers thought of another quote of hers—and writers particularly probably should have been struck by it: “When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me.’”

Quote of the Day (Desmond Tutu, on the Blessing of Families)

“You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them.”—South African Anglican Archbishop, human-rights advocate, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu, God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time (2004)

Happy Thanksgiving, for all our families.

(Photo of Archbishop Tutu taken by Elke Wetzig at the Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchentag in Cologne, Germany, in 2007.)