And how was your reunion dinner?

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I certainly hope it was more enjoyable than mine!

Mil doesn’t cook nowadays so our reunion dinner was held at an old coffee- shop-cum-old-style-Chinese restaurant at Geylang! The dinner had a bad start as we had to wait 45 minutes for the 1st dish to be served. Imagine trying to be patient & quiet for 45 minutes when you are ravenous and all of 19months old.

So 34 weeks pregnant me had to take the 19mth old out to distract her after 20 minutes of waiting. And so dh was left to fend off questions of “when is the food coming?” and “why is it taking so long?” over and over.

Next, bear in mind that both dd#1 and I are allergic to shellfish and yes, the entire family knows that. The 1st 3 dishes that came all had shellfish in it! In fact, only 3 dishes in total had no shellfish in it! Sigh.

I’ve always tried to avoid giving either the children or myself medication to control our allergies unless absolutely necessary. In this case, it was either eat the shellfish dishes and take the medication (when home) or starve till the next edible dish came along. And who knows how long that would take since the interval between the dishes were more than 10 – 15 minutes apart.

And the worse part of it all? The food wasn’t even nice! It was full of MSG and salt 🙁 I was so glad when we could go home.

Ds#1 was funny. When asked if he enjoyed the dinner, he said he enjoyed the canned Yeo’s Chrysanthemum drink the best! Lol!

Reunion dinners have always been a necessary evil in my mind since young but this one definitely takes the cake as the absolutely worst I’ve had in my life!

Actually I have never enjoyed Chinese New Year and the accompanying rituals and traditions associated with it. Sure it was nice to receive the red packets or ang pows when single and younger. But that was about it. Being dragged from one home to another and mind you, my mom has 9 other siblings! was so boring. I was so glad when I got married and was excused from tagging along when my parents went visiting.

Singapore is so small, we can visit one another in a blink of an eye. It’s not as though one had to fly or drive for hours to see each other. And the thing is most times it is a big farce. Relatives who don’t get along meet once a year out of duty and obligation. They put on a happy face just because everyone wants to have a prosperous new year, make meaningless small talk and ask predictable questions!

I am all for family unity but if one only made an effort to meet once a year and not even receive a sms or email the rest of the year, what unity is there?

And my other bug bear? Most of us don’t even understand the significance of the rituals that have been passed down! And we want to be careful here since some of these so-called “traditions” are paganistic. Don’t just follow a practice that you have been taught without understanding what you are doing. Don’t just do the rituals because you are Chinese! But there is no need to swing to the extreme either and refuse to participate in everything, ok?

Well, here’s wishing you a blessed new year!

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