Welcome back from the Thanksgiving Holiday. I hope you ate too much, slept too long and did less work than you planned. If you did, you had a successful break in my book.

For me, Thanksgiving always brings back memories of family. I know family is a hard thing to generalize about, because there are so many different shapes and sizes of families, but let me try to describe what I believe to be true about families, and you decide how my observations fit your family.

For better or worse, families are the people we know the most about and that know the most about us. That’s good because they know our strengths. It’s not as easy because they know our weaknesses. If empathy exists in our family, those closest to us will be there for us no matter what. They will love us not in spite of our imperfections but because of them; because they usually recognize the same shortcomings in themselves.

I have seen my relationships with my brothers improve over the years. When I was the youngest of three boys, I spent most of my time trying to undo the damage my oldest brother was creating. Now, when I ask him about it, he says he wasn’t trying to be a problem, he was just an eccentric, some would say, weird kid, listening to classical music at ear-splitting levels at age 8.

When you get to know a bunch of quirky people really well, you have a family. They may share your name or just your life, but your family will be very important to you