Individually and collectively we have mood swings that could kill a horse at 50 paces. So when everything's going well at the dinner table, we get a little jumpy, like soldiers who have been in the trenches for a week and can't get used to peacetime quiet. We feel most at home when voices are raised and there's a little roughhousing around the edges. We're at one another from the moment we start planning the menu until after the dessert dishes are washed. It's an inevitable result of too many people packed around the table, too many cooks in the kitchen, each with our own tastes and techniques, and all of them fair game for debate.
Some years are worse than others.
I remember one year, when I was 16 or 17, it got so bad that I stormed out of the house to walk four blocks in the snow without a coat. My grandma followed me in her slippers, begging me to come back and finish making the gravy. If not for that serious issue, I might have kept going and frozen to death on my way to the next town. My girlfriend has witnessed some of it, and we talk every winter about starting our own, healthy, humanistic traditions at home. Maybe we'll stay in pajamas all day and eat our dinner out of little white boxes with wire handles.