Lunch with the girls… catching up after winter (or summer, for the other part of the world) vacations

If all your friends are from another country, as they are in my case, when December comes, we all make travel arrangements to go to our home country (or not) and enjoy a nice vacation (or not) with the family (or not)…
As predicted, each one of us comes with a different experience all together, so a meet-up to catch-up it’s a must.
We agreed to visit one of my friend’s house in the upper west side of the city, and in a cold winter day, with a temperature below freezing, we arrived to the convened place to have lunch there.
You always start with the awkward greetings after the Holidays… “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year” even though it’s been over a month since that happened… and you try to cheat reality by accounting your vacation events as “the perfect getaway ever!”; your family finally learned how to behave in public, you didn’t have a fist fight with your sister and you and your husband were like love-birds over a tree the entire time that you were away…
Pinocchio must definitely be reincarnated as a girl, because you just did a really nice job auditioning for the part!!
But after a couple of hours (and drinks), the story starts to crumble into pieces and you don’t sound that convincing anymore; like the time you are telling them what a wonderful “going away party” your family did for you, when in fact it was a “go away party”… and in the middle of the sentence you just realized that you blew-it big time!!
So long happy story, hello reality!
Your friends are staring at you, and you don’t know if they are horrified for your lie, grateful to you because they finally can share their true recollections too, or because they’re appalled by the craziness of your family and the fact that you definitely need therapy!
At the end, you learn that everyone has the family that best suits them…
I love my messy relatives, they’re noisy as hell, madness is a given and “composure” it’s an unknown term in they day-to-day lives.
I mean, who can blame them? We most surely need a dose of idiotic behavior once in a while…
Gratefully, I live eight thousand miles away… mess; I can cope with only once a year.