My family does a similar thing. You can never tell the sister you’re upset with that you are upset with them, you tell another sister, or maybe Mom, and that person tells the offending sister, and then relays the response back to the original complainer. If you tell Mom, she tells everyone and then everyone get mad at you for upsetting Mom. Luckily, I live too far away to be an effective player, but I sometimes get caught when I go for visits.
OK, here is my dorky family tradition: V8 at holiday dinners. Seriously. It isn’t as exciting as “move your meat lose your seat” (although we do that one, too, especially after Thanksgiving when people are fighting for places in front of the fireplace to nap), but it is distinctly ours.
Also, at Thanksgiving, we always say grace the same way: “Good bread, good meat, good God, let’s eat, go Rovers whoooooo!” Because my high school has always has a football game at 10am on Thanksgiving Day (even when my grandparents attended), and our mascot is the “Red Rover,” and we are usually really really drunk by the time we eat at 1pm. So grace is short but sweet.
An Xmas tradtion started in the Tel house was begun when Lil’Tel was 6 she stated she wanted to help put the ‘garlic’ (meaning garland) on the tree. Been an embaressment to her ever since. She hates it.
Also let us not ofrget the ever present game of Slug Bug/PT Punch. Drive by a dealer and it’s a bruising free for all.
In my extended family nowadays we don’t have any ‘kiddie table’ tradition 'cause it’s not safe to leave the various kids alone together without adult supervision, but when I was a kid the ‘kiddie table’ did come into play, but only on Sundays, esprecially in Winter.
Winter was when all the Greats and Grands came down from Michigan to Florida, where we lived, to spend the Winter. Gramma & Grampa and Uncle P would stay at my Aunt & Uncle’s, just down the road, and Aunt M would stay with us. Sometimes Uncle O and some other family members would come too. Anyway, Sunday was Fried Chicken Day, and everybody would go to Aunt & Uncle’s for Sunday dinner. That’s where the kiddie table came in, except the rule wasn’t move your meat, lose your seat, it was ‘leave the table, and you’re done eatin’ 'Cause when you came back your plate would be empty, and you couldn’t just go to the ‘big’ table for more either. You’d probably get laughed at and be given green beans or something when what you wanted was chicken.
Anyway, around here the kids eat mixed in with the grown-ups and are expected to use their manners and do get seconds if they ask nice, and if the food’s good, there are no bad seats.
My original (biological) family does have another tradition. It’s called 'Pray for Bumbazine to find God,’ which is one of the reasons why they’re on the East coast and I live in Oregon.
My ‘married into’ family has a number of traditions also, but I’d like to maintain some semblence of normalcy in the minds of my fellow Dopers, so I’ll not mention those.
There. I didn’t hijack the thread once. I knew I could do it!
- Bumba (team player)
[hijack]
Thanks for the kind words about my sister, swampbear. I’ll start another thread when we learn anything. She’s got new health insurance starting in less than two weeks, so isn’t going to do anything until after then, obviously (and her doctor was kind enough to not write anything in her chart!). So it may be a while before we know anything. Our dad died of Parkinson’s a few years ago and she and I have both worried about our sons getting it, but not ourselves! Go figure.
[/hijack]
When we were kids at the kids table, we were allowed to get seconds, but we had to have finished our firsts first. Our family rule was always, “If you serve it to yourself, you have to eat ALL of it; but if someone else serves it to you, you only have to take one bite.” A truly lovely rule. I remember insisting on being served many, many times as a suspicious child. My mother, of course, never fails to trot out the tired old story about how when I was 4 and had to take my one required bite of tuna casserole that my grandma had fixed and ended up eating three helpings.
Is there ANY way to de-implant those tired old stories from parental brains?
Totally agree with the whole concept of “move your meat, lose your seat” - exactly the same happens in our house, on a very regular basis. We don’t have many nice chairs that give a good view of the TV, so if any more than 2 people are watching it… the war begins (it’s not an accepted rule in our house, and arguments frequently follow)
What’s worse is that our cat has taken to moulting an awful lot, all over the nice chairs. Which means that nice chairs are usually down by 1 - to 1 - because nobody wishes to sit on the fur mat. 
Not my family, but a family I knew had a more complicated version of “move your meat, lose your seat”… if you were getting up from a seat, and you knew that you wanted it back, and you remembered you could call “fives”. It was best to get a witness for calling fives, who would vouch that you remembered to call fives. Then, provided you returned in five minutes or less, you could reclaim your seat. If you forgot, or were longer than five minutes, you were out of luck.
It has the side benefit of starting all sorts of minor arguements [But I called fives! No you didn’t! That was way more than five minutes!] that can be had all in good fun. Well, usually. Sometimes they get violent. But not too violent.
My dad had a tradition when we were kids. The setting was the living room with any number of the five of us kids sprawled around watching TV. Dad would look at one of us, get a concerned expression on his face, and say “Stand up for a minute.”
We hop up and go “What? Is there a bug on me? What? What is it?”
Then Dad would say “While you’re up, go to the kitchen and get me <drink/snack>”
Ha ha - funny guy. We didn’t fall for it after the 8th or 9th time…
When I was a kid, we had a Christmas Eve dinner at the paternal grandparent’ house, with presents afterward, and a Christmas Day dinner at the maternal grandparents’ home, with presents afterword (and Santa came to our house in the morning, so there were three separate gift opening opportunities). Anyway, both houses needed a kid’s table, but I was the youngest and so knew half the family would have to die before I got to sit with the adults, so it never bugged me much. However, we did have to wait until the adults were all done with dessert and coffee before any presents were opened. At my maternal grandparents’ house, dessert was rushed to the table as soon as the main meal was over, so the wait was not long. But my father’s relatives would have coffee before bringing out dessert, and then linger over more coffee after dessert. Pure agony.
We no longer have a kid’s table. We were informed, quite firmly, by my niece, age 12, that it was to be called the teen’s table.
This isn’t a family thing, but the best system is to call “chairbacks.” It helps to have someone get your chairbacks for you, but it’s not necessary if everyone has agreed to the honor system. Chairbacks are invalid after you have sat down somewhere else. When someone gets up and forgets to call chairbacks, you have to be careful in trying to get to their seat. If they see you approaching, they’ll be reminded and can call it up to the point where your ass is in the seat. But you also want to make sure you get the seat before they remember.
The seating hierarchy at our house when we were all kids went strictly by age. The older got the best floor seat for tv (we weren’t allowed on the furniture) and the window seat in the car. Being that I was the second oldest and the oldest girl I had a pretty good spot. Of course, if I had to sit in the front seat of the car I lost out to my Mom and Grandmother and had to perch over the hump.
Seating at the dinner table was assigned. I’m not sure how but I ended up sitting on a sewing bench. Downside-it had no back. Upside-it had a removable top and space to stash the icky vegetables. Until I forgot to clean them out later and they started to get a bit pungent that is.
Later on we had a long trestle table with benches on either side. Adults got the chairs at either end, but my seniority secured an end seat near my favorite Aunt’s chair. (She liked playing at the table too.)
Nowadays I don’t much care which seat I have at the table as long as it has a back.
I fear that my siblings are beginning to forget the hierarchy rules now that they’re all over 30. Just this past saturday I had to pointedly remind my younger brother that he really should cede the recliner to me, as respected elder sister.
He pretended to have a task to do elsewhere necessitating his leaving the cushy spot and, invoking the “you move, you lose” rule I took my rightful place in the comfy chair where I remained ensconced for the rest of the evening.
Kids. I swear.
We still have kiddie tables - but the exact format varies from house to house. At Grandma’s, the kids (10 of us ages 23 to 30) eat first and are then sent to play while the adults (50+) eat. At this point, we all grab our plates and eat elsewhere such that the adults can start in and finish sometime within the same day. At Aunt 1’s house, the kids get the basement. Everyone stocks their plate and heads down and eats around the pingpong table. At Aunt 2’s house, it’s a standard kids table that’s to the side of the kitchen, while the adults are in the real dining room.
We still have two distinct groups, but more and more it’s separating into the Rowdy bunch (most of the kids, a few old folks) and the Refined bunch (a few of the kids, most of the old folks). Some of the kids got sick of … I’m not sure what while some of the old folks got sick of discussions of medical problems, financial affairs and other Family Traditions.
I plan to stay at the kids table forever.
Heck, these days I’d prefer it too. Best of both worlds. The only adult at the table, I’d get my own bottle of wine, and I’d get to chat to the kids about Sponge Bob Squarepants and important stuff like that. I’d get some killer sugar-rush desserts too. Then there’s also the option of terrorising the little kids and being the world’s first ever Evil Overlord of the Kiddie Table.
“Hey, that’s my chocolate!”
"Listen up punk. I’m 33 years old, I weigh four times as much as you do, and if give you a Chinese burn, who they gonna believe? Huh? You’ll be grounded for eons for lying. Now just sit very still and eat your broccoli, and nobody’s gonna get hurt…
…Oi! I’ll have that free toy from the crisps packet too. No, in your OTHER pocket! Don’t play games with me. I am all-seeing. Hand it over nice and easy now…"
Yair, that’d be cool.
Obviously, this tradition was started by people who wouldn’t bodily lift an interloper out of their pilfered seat, deposit them on the floor, sit down, say, ‘You moved.’ I.e., not my family.
Is it still a kiddy table when a 35-year-old and a 22-year-old are sitting there? I think at that point it becomes a dining annex.
Among the women in my family, we have a tradition known as the “Chain of Command” It begins with my oldest sister. If she wants something, she (supposedly) asks my next oldest sister who will then tell my sister who’s closest in age who’s then supposed to try to get me to do it. The chain of command sucked when I was little, obviously, but now I have three nieces who lie at the bottom of the chain. They love it.
-Lil
We’re developing the tradition of me looking around very carefully and then ducking whenever I cross the apartment, because Mr. Lissar is usually either waving nunchaku, swords, scyes (not sure about spelling. Pointy things) around, or doing some obscure martial art. So I duck a lot, and shout things like, “I’m coming out of the kitchen carrying something very hot, please don’t hit me!”
It’s not nearly as exciting as it sounds.
That’s a scythe, ** Lissla **. Since I am perhaps the world’s worst speller, I only know that because it’s part of the funniest scenes ever in British comedy.
"Oh! It’s a * scythe! *
** Here it is: ** It’s from Blackadder Season 2, Episode 6 with Edmund and the Spanish Torturer.
Later…
T: …tus testiculos.
E: My, um, ah yes, those, yes…
T: …sobre un fuego grande.
E: …over a large…
T: Fuego, fuego. (makes fire motion with his hands, then blows on the tips of his fingers)
E: Oh, fire, fire. Ah good, so let’s recap. Um…if I admit that I’m in love–
T: (interjects) No! No! (rolls onto his back)
E: Sorry – head-over-heels in love – (T makes various motions to indicate each thing) with Satan and all his little wizards, then you will remove my testicles with a blunt instrument–
T: Una (polan~a?), una polan~a.
E: …resembling some kind of gardening tool but we can’t quite (obscured by laughter). Um, and roast them over a large fire.
T: Si’, si’.
E: Whereas if I don’t admit that I’m in love with Satan and…and…all his…
his little wizards, (T again is making appropriate gestures for each item)
you will hold me upside down in a vat of warm marmalade.
T: (holds his hands out, expecting more) …y…
E: And remove my testicles with a blunt…oh I see. Well, well, in that case,
I love Satan.
T: (excited) Ohh ho ho! (produces instrument)
E: Oh, it’s a scythe…
From here: http://hem1.passagen.se/dunsel/ba2-6.htm
At our family table, everyone has their assigned seats, so there’s no dilema there. Except, of course, when the cats decide that they deserve a seat too (every meal), they decide to play the “move your meat, lose your seat” game and jump into your chair if you get up. Most of the time they’ll do this right before you sit down just for spite.
As for our extended family, it’s so large that the adult table barely has enough room as is. The “adults” still deny us cousins into their elite club, continuously exiling us to eat with the kids. Everyone’s in good health, too, so it doesn’t look like any room will be freed up at the adult table anytime soon. That is…if I don’t take matters into my own hands…
Actually, I believe the word Lissla was looking for is “sai.” Kind of like a mini pitchfork. Please don’t ask me how I know this.
Seating arrangements around our house were resolved in much the same way as robertliguori’s, which means my Dad pretty much sat anywhere he wanted. Mom too, but that’s just because Dad would cheat and back her up.
This tradition has been suspended indefinitely, because my brother and I are now capable of inflicting serious injuries on each other.
You know it’s “sai” from watching the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and you know it Ex.
Hey! Did you notice? I think we have a new record here folks! We’ve gone about as long as we ever have without veering off into Hijackville. I don’t know what to say. I’m getting a little dizzy.
And look at all these bright, shiny, new faces! Look, there’s even Hamadryad! I seem to remember someone swearing they’d never sully themselves by posting in an MMP. Who could that have been? I don’t rightly remember. Do you Hanny? Bwa-hahahahaha!
-Rue. (dizzy)