When I was a child there were often big family gatherings, full of random family members I didn't recognise, telling me how much I'd grown.
All of the extended family were there. All kinds of "aunties" and "cousins" who were actually your aunties half sister's cat's cousin twice removed.
The kids would always play together, running about the dance floor, drinking coke from glass bottles and falling asleep on those pub couches with that very specific kind of fabric.
These events were sometimes weddings and funerals but were also often christenings, communions, big birthdays, anniversaries etc.
I went to a funeral a couple of months ago that was sort of similar and it hit me suddenly that it had probably been about 15 years since I had been to an event like that and I would likely never see a lot of these people ever again.
I feel like as all my grandparents generation passed away it really stopped. It's like they were the glue that held the family together - the root of the extended family, with the rest of us cascading out from there, connected through them.
The next generation - my parents generation - are still sort of close and I know get together but it seems different now. It's much smaller. They never do the "everyone's invited" big events with random relatives and I don't think, as a child, you'd find any great uncles you don't recognise to tell you how tall you'd gotten.
There's been weddings and funerals I've been to, of course, but the fashion seems to be for them to be smaller. In one way they're more intimate (in the sense that there are fewer people there) but also less intimate in the sense that people come in immediate family groups and generally stay together and don't mingle.
Relatives as close as first cousins now often don't invite each other to weddings as they stick to immediate family (as did I) - which means that the "wedding and funerals" relatives are no longer even that. I'm not complaining - as I said, my own wedding was very small as well. I actually think it's better not to spend loads of money feeing relatives you barely know. It's just that it means with that culture change we never ever see each other.
I guess I assumed as I grew up that the big extended family dynamic would stay the same and the younger ones (us) would take over. That's not happened.
I am close with my immediate family and get together with them often - parents, siblings, nieces and nephews. But that's 10 of us playing board games in someone's house or going out for a curry etc. I cannot envision a situation we would book out a room for anything or would have enough people to invite to fill it.
I know people will probably tell me that I could make an effort and organise a big party or say I'm being entitled. I'm not complaining that nobody is throwing big parties and inviting me - I am just reminiscing and feeling a bit sad that my DS will probably never experience that built extended family dynamic that I did.
It's not even like I loved buffet queues and drunk relatives dancing to ABBA as a child - it's just that those memories form such a big part of my childhood and I don't know when it changed.
Would love to hear if anyone has experienced the same or even different? Have things changed in this way since you were a child?