Quantity vs. Quality

In my family, we always work really hard to get home to my mom's house in Pennsylvania for holidays. We have always celebrated Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas together, unless one of us is out of the country.  This Easter though, after driving the nine-hour drive to PA on Thursday and back on Sunday, I realized that what makes my time with my family special is the quality, not the quantity.  In fact, if we're around each other for too long, tempers start to fly and somebody needs some time to cool off.  This trip was really fast, but worth it.

 Quality versus quantity really struck me on Easter morning.  We each had personalized Easter baskets when we were younger.  They were never too elaborate or expensive--no Wii's in this kid's basket--but they had more than enough candy for one child.  We've progressively reduced how much chocolate was in our baskets over the years, with this year's being the smallest so far.  The basket contained a few handfuls of mini Snickers bars, mini-chocolate eggs, some chocolate-covered pretzels (we really like our chocolate in my family) and three Divine 85% Dark Chocolate bars.  Instead of piles of Easter candy that we could fight over, we had one family Easter basket, with high-quality chocolate.  That's sort of how this family holiday felt.  It wasn't the unbroken family time that we had when we all lived under one roof.  It wasn't the three weeks or so that we'd have off of undergrad for Christmas.  It was a few short days to laugh, listen, share and just be together.  It was high quality this Easter.