When I hear the words "family tradition," I picture a long table, covered by a red tablecloth and surrounded by excited faces, watching Grandpa carve the turkey.

    Nothing will separate this family on this special day, not distance or prior obligations. A heavy sheet of snow is starting to fall outside. Perfection is nearby, within grasp, for this family, and they know it.

    If this is the definition of a family tradition, then my family is as good as tradition-less, and with Thanksgiving quickly approaching, the people I plan to spend this holiday with and the way we plan to spend it seems more and more important, making the fact that we have no real traditions more and more unsettling.

    But then I think about my family and the people in it. What defines a "family tradition"?

    Is the annual decorating of gingerbread houses by all the kids in my family a tradition? Or is a family tradition a more formal affair, an entire family sitting down to a candlelight meal?

    Last Thanksgiving, my cousin, Jamie and I started a new tradition by me sleeping over the night before Thanksgiving and helping glue gingerbread houses together with sticky frosting so that they would be ready to decorate by all of the kids the next day.

    While we stuck the houses together, my younger cousin took pictures of us dancing around the kitchen to The Best of the Nineties and getting frosting on our faces.

    The next night, I stayed over again. We looked at the goofy pictures from the previous night and decided to post them on Facebook. Once we got online, we saw that other people had been at work uploading holiday pictures as well.

    We couldn’t help ourselves but check out how everyone else’s Thanksgivings went. We saw a picture of a group of girls wearing hand painted shirts that read "Grandma’s Cookie Workshop 2008" and making thousands of dozens of sugar and chocolate chip cookies.

    As we clicked through album after album, I realized that nobody’s Thanksgivings looked exactly alike. Actually, nobody’s Thanksgivings even vaguely resembled each other.

    Suddenly, the perfect family I imagined wasn’t the definition of a family tradition, but a single family, celebrating the holidays with its own traditions that my family is under no obligation to follow.

    It’s a good thing they’re not obligated because instead of dining quietly this Thanksgiving, my family will carry out its tradition of speaking loudly to be heard over each other and banishing anyone who is or has been a child in the past 10 years to eat the turkey dinner in the basement.

    Family traditions, like families, come in all shapes and sizes, holiday season or not. The perfect family I imagined was not a standard to compare my family to, no matter how good they all look in their Sunday best, chowing down on light meat and mashed potatoes.