So, it's not that one xblock has multiple parents are you're getting all of them, it's that you're climbing the tree of parent/child nodes and getting the parent of the parent of the parent, and so on. I think a better name for this variable would be `ancestor_xblocks` -- that's clearer to me.

Also, if you want to be fancy, you could write a generator function to do this:
```python
def get_ancestors_xblock(xblock):
    parent = get_parent_xblock(xblock)
    while parent:
        yield parent
        parent = get_parent_xblock(parent)

ancestors = reversed(get_ancestors_xblock(xblock))
```