A few years back, when I was writing a fictional play based on my factual life, I decided to take my parents to lunch and tell them my plan. It included writing characters based on my mother and my grandmother. 

My mother was beyond flattered (she shouldn’t have been). But my father was worried that I’d share family stories about his mother because pretty much every one of them revealed that Grandma was—to use the term back from back then—nuts.

“Now, Pamela, you’re not going to share the story of how Grandma threw a hammer at Grandpa and they sent her away, are you?” he asked. 

My mother chimed in: “Billy, she’s an artist—you can’t censor her.” 

 I wanted to give my mother a big kiss for calling me an “artist,” but I was still reeling from the hammer story. I wondered, ‘Did she hit or miss?’ And then I remembered I’d always been told Grandma made regular visits to a “fat farm.” Turns out she was actually being sent away for electric shock treatments.

It was a new wrinkle to all the old stories I had heard. Like how they escaped from the Cossacks in the 1920s and Grandma hid her jewels in body cavities that cannot be mentioned. Or how Grandma was the original home shopping network—she would lie in bed and order shoes from Saks Fifth Avenue and have them hand-delivered to Staten Island. Or how Grandpa was the first doctor on Staten Island to have a car. 

These were the stories I’d heard so many times as a kid that they reached mythical proportions in our house. They were the stories of our family’s past, showing us where we came from and how our parents became our parents. 

Through these stories, passed down to us, I learned that my mother was considered to be from the “wrong side of the tracks” when she married my father because her mother was a seamstress who didn’t shop at Saks. My mother, who is an amazing cook, was also considered the worst cook ever when she was first married because she made tomato sauce from ketchup. My parents spent their first years in Switzerland while my father was in medical school, and one legendary story had it that my older siblings were featured on the cover of the Swiss Life Magazine as the first American twins born in Switzerland after World War II. 

I don’t know how much of this is true. I don’t even know if there was a Swiss Life Magazine. Somehow it didn’t matter. These stories were part of our family lore, much better and funnier than anything I could ever make up. Regardless of whether the stories stretched the truth, they helped define our family.

The stories were told around the dinner table or while driving on long car trips. And they were shared loudly every holiday, perhaps as a way to bring relatives who were no longer with us into the room. We heard them over and over, yet we never tired of them. We learned about my mother’s aunt, known as Dumb Dora, though her husband one day disappeared and was never found, so maybe she wasn’t so dumb after all. 

Actually, my husband had an Aunt Dora, too. Originally, the story said she went out west and became successful in business cleaning freight cars. Turns out she was doing more than cleaning the cars; her moniker became Great Aunt Dora the Madame.

The more I heard my husband’s family lore, the more I realized his stories were even more colorful than mine. My favorite involved his family relationship to The Three Stooges. The Howards—Moe, Curley and Shemp—were cousins of my husband’s paternal grandmother. According to family legend, my husband’s grandmother loaned Moe half her first paycheck ($5), which he never paid back. 

When my husband was little, he would watch The Three Stooges on television and tell his friends, “Those are my cousins.” But no one believed him. So his brother wrote to Moe, who eventually wrote back and told him to show the letter to all his friends to prove that they were related. Today that letter is framed and hangs on the wall, along with a picture of my husband, his brother and Moe on a family trip to California, circa 1970. By the way, on that trip, he asked Moe for his grandmother’s $5. 

My husband’s other famous cousin was Sydney Franklin from Brooklyn, known as the first (only?) successful Jewish-American matador. He hung out with Picasso and Hemingway in Spain. 

Funny thing about stories is that we’re all busy living our lives, not noticing how we’re weaving the next round of family lore. My husband and I met in London on a semester abroad. He jokes that he picked me as the smartest girl in the class and that if I got him through the semester, he would spend the rest of his life with me. That joke is now part of our new family lore.

And so is what he claimed to be the real story. He said he actually went home from our first date and told his roommate that I was the girl he was going to marry—which is crazy considering we were 19 and 20 at the time. For years, I challenged his story. I would argue, “You probably said I was the type of girl—the category of girl—but not the actual girl.” Finally, his roommate, Bruce, confirmed the legend by making the story his toast at our wedding. 

We lost Bruce a few years later to cancer at a young age. And that became part of our family story, too: the loss of loved ones who were taken too soon. Like my mother-in-law, who battled cancer from the time my husband was 6 years old. Her sense of humor and resilience in the face of multiple cancers became the stories that my children have used to come to know her. 

One of my all-time favorite stories is about my father-in-law, who was notorious for not paying attention to what was going on around him. When my mother-in-law was in the hospital toward the end of her life, we all went to dinner one night to cheer each other up, and as my father-in-law walked past a woman who was breast-feeding her baby, he actually said, “What a cute baby. How adorable. Is that your baby?” No, Dad, she was a wet nurse. We still all laugh about that time we needed a laugh so badly. 

In the last few days of my mother-in-law’s life, we would sit in her hospital room and share stories of my husband’s family. Sometimes we laughed so hard we were afraid they would throw us out. And sometimes we would laugh so hard we started to cry. My father-in-law’s cry was huge, mixed in with giggles and snot and tears. It was the very meaning of catharsis. 

Apparently, the stories that will define my immediate family are mostly connected to bodily functions, which is not surprising, given that my husband likes to say I carried the Stooge seed. Like how my son, at age 2, started christening neighborhood yards like a dog marking territory. It didn’t help that our neighbor, who was the general manager of the Washington Capitals hockey team, told him it was making the team win and he should keep doing it. Or the legendary diaper-leakage stories, including one at a family wedding during the actual ceremony, and one at an Arby’s on Route 15 that will always be remembered as “the Epic Diaper Explosion Arby’s.” Or the story of my husband changing my son’s diaper in a Barnes & Noble while visiting family in Florida and slamming our son’s finger in the changing table. To this day, my son has trouble walking into that restroom. But we always tell him, “Be glad it was just your finger.” 

My children can proudly recite, word for word, the story of my now 27-year-old nephew (about to earn his MBA from University of Texas), who as a toddler was in the room while my husband was on a conference call with an important client, and my nephew started screaming to my husband, “Please wipe my butt!” 

Of course, it’s most fun to tell these kinds of stories. Any family’s stories weave into the big stories of a generation—stories of immigration and wars, in my family’s case. Our children’s stories will weave against a backdrop of a country following a terrorist attack and a massive recession.

Or maybe that’s why so many family stories make us laugh: They’re the history of happiness against a backdrop of struggle and challenge. As the holidays roll around, we’ll continue to tell old stories and make new ones. In the end, though, after I’m gone, I hope the biggest story my kids will remember is how much their father and I love each other and, most important, how much we love them.