Do you have a favorite family dinnertime memory?

When my Mom was alive, every birthday, Christmas, Easter, or Thanksgiving dinner we’d all hold hands and sing the “jiggy-jig song”. Jelly vets know what I’m talking about.

The time my mother insisted my little brother (Ben’s dad) eat a pea. My bro cut the pea into four pieces and ate each piece with a slice of Wonderbread. And the liver and bacon meal struggles, and the times my mother used to demonstrate what she remembered of her tap dancing movie days.

I hated mealtime with my family. It was always tense, ugly, full of anger, insults and sometimes ended in a beating.

Sure – of my alcoholic father finally falling asleep.

Eating vegetables and crying

I’ve never had a family dinnertime..

My mom once had her knee on my chest while she forced peas into my mouth. I kept gagging and throwing them up and she kept forcing them back in.
I still hate peas.

@Trillian what is wrong with parents that do that?

I am very proud that all four of my kids love to have meals with me. I really somehow avoided becoming my parents.

@dpworkin @Simone_De_Beauvoir @rangerr That makes me sad. :( You’re all coming over for dinner.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir her own childhood was really bad. Her mom put her in foster care to be with her new husband. One of her brothers got rickets, they were fed so poorly. Once her mom saw her and crossed the street so her mother in law wouldn’t know she already had kids. She still has no real adequate coping mechanism, and sees life from a place that I cannot visit.

@jjmah okay, :)
@Trillian must be hard.

unfortunately no

The most recent was a special dessert of Jelly Belly’s Bean Boozled jelly beans: http://www.jellybelly.com/our_candy/beanboozled.aspx. What looks like juicy pear may actually be booger flavored. We laughed until our stomachs and faces hurt. When my partner got that booger bean on accident we all almost peed our pants over the look on her face!

edit: btw, Wundayatta, Yay for the convo with your daughter!

Picking my MIL back up off the floor after her 5 glasses of red wine was priceless..

On holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, my Mom would set a magnificent table, and we would all sit around it in our Sunday best. We began with a prayer, and would eat politely, and happily engage in warm conversation.
Eventually, though, to my Mother’s consternation, these meals always ended with Fart stories, and conversation that she found offensive.

When my kids were young dinnertime was special every day. More times that not, we had kid friends for dinner. We always said the best and worst parts of our days. Sometimes we made funny stories, one sentence at a time, alternating authors. Those are good memories for me. I don’t understand families that do not take advantage of a dinner together every night.

One time, at band camp…I mean, some years back, my dad made a dinner and invited some people, and we had chili burgers.

While handling the burger dripping with chunky red sauce, I was all like, dude, check this out, menstrual waste.

I grossed everyone out, but they responded with a Hobbit worthy merry laughter straight from the heart, and we had a good time.

I wish every day was this cool.

I remember a family BBQ one year and my grandfather was showing off flipping the burgers. On one attempt he flipped the burger and as it was coming down our dog, Tramp, jumped up from, what seemed like, nowhere and caught the burger in his mouth.

When I was six there was very unusual February thaw in North Dakota. We had a picnic on the patio and I learned to ride my bike that day.

I tried to think of a good one, but what keeps coming to mind is my mother making me “sit there” until I ate my hominy. And all the bawling and drama.

@Skaggfacemutt I have the same memory from childhood. Why did they think hominy was edible?

When I was growing up, on some occasions, my father would tell a story he made up. It would go on night after night until he got tired of it. We really enjoyed those stories. They involved an old friend of his transplanted to some strange, mountainous land.

I, myself, have created a character who is often a guest on the Garden state Parkway Show. This is a radio show that I make up while driving on the eponymous highway. Often I feel too tired to do this, so the end of the parkway comes as a relief. But they love this character (an asian chef who makes the most disgusting things imaginable and has an enormous ego). Usually they have to call him, and of course, every time they call him, he is in the shower. He is also very mean to people who call him, or when he is the host on the show, to his guests, often threatening them with various implements from his kitchen.

When my sister was three, she refused to eat a link of pork sausage for breakfast. At that time she had an English Nanny (dreadful, rigid and uncompromising).

My sister and the sauage were sent to their room until the sausage was eaten. That never happened, and my sister was released at some point. But she’s never forgotten staring at the cold and greasy thing.

There was this old commercial in the 1970s for Chicken of the Sea with Charlie the Tuna character. His tagline was, “Tell ‘em Charlie sent ‘ya,” in this weird voice. Flash forward to 1993 my whole family is having cake and coffee for something or other and my brother had just begun to swallow his coffee when I, for no apparent reason that I can recall now, said in that same weird voice, “Tell ‘em Charlie sent ‘ya,” He spewed the coffee from his nose all over the table. We laughed until we cried. It was gross and funny too.

yeah. when we go to my auntys house she makes these massive breakfasts. and once i ate so much i spent the rest of the morning crouched over the toilet puking it back up. amazingly i was starving after