My sister met her future husband when he rang the wrong doorbell to our Montreal duplex some fifty years ago– and she answered. Eventually, they fell in love, got married, he got transferred to California and I followed them.
Had he not rung the wrong doorbell, I most likely would never have moved to Los Angeles.
Why do I share that story?
Because I’ve learned over the years that every family has its own memorable stories. We usually know the big ones, like those connected to dark moments like the Holocaust.
I’m referring to quirky stories that tend to get lost in the passage of time. Those stories only come out when we do a little digging, and Thanksgiving is an ideal time to do that digging.
As an added bonus, it turns out that seeking out family stories tends to create happier families.
“The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: develop a strong family narrative,” author Bruce Feiler wrote in 2013.
Feiler did years of research on the subject, talking to families and experts in the field. He reports on a study that used a measure called the “Do You Know?” scale that asked children to answer 20 questions.
Examples included: Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Do you know where your mom and dad went to high school? Do you know where your parents met? Do you know an illness or something really terrible that happened in your family? Do you know the story of your birth?
The study concluded that “The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned.”
What gets in the way of digging up those family stories?
For starters, they have to compete with a whole other category of stories—those that assault us every hour on social media and news sites. Those stories appeal to our “need to know what’s going on” and our fascination with bad news in general. They tend to dominate our conversations, and that includes our Thanksgiving and Shabbat conversations.
But here’s the thing about those stories– they require little effort on our part, except perhaps the outrage we often express when we read them. We just regurgitate what the profit-driven media algorithms are feeding us.
Family stories are different. They belong to us, the good and the bad. We gather them. We create them. We pass them down. They require intention and effort.
We can gather those stories at any time, not just at Thanksgiving. Even if we think we already know plenty of them, it’s fascinating to imagine that there may be other great family stories out there just waiting to be plucked.
Like that story many years ago of the man who rang the wrong doorbell and changed my life.
Happy storytelling.
