Home For The Holidays - 1995 - 7/10

When I first got married, my father offered sound advice,
“Start your own traditions.”
Growing up, I had witnessed my parents try and fail to do just that.
Season after season, our family bundled into the car and spent the holidays with Dad’s parents or with Mom’s.

Home For The Holidays shows grown children making the yearly pilgrimage to their parents home.
They have already started their own families, their own traditions, their own story, yet it is so hard to break free.
Old resentments surface, siblings who have become strangers - if they ever knew each other to begin with, observing the parents, once so vibrant, growing old, becoming frail.
The Thanksgiving get-together gone to hell.
Movie shifts from laugh out loud funny to poignant to almost desperately sad.
Charles Durning sums up the next holiday nicely, “I can’t wait for goddamned Christmas.”
Another reminder of why I never visit my family or Zelda’s family during the holidays.