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Herding families together for the holidays is a delightful, yet challenging tradition.

The difficulties - and blessings - increase as families blossom through marriages and limited days send everyone hurriedly to one hometown before speeding to the next.

A few years ago Bob and I hosted my family of about 14 for Christmas. Apparently our home shrunk since I was a kid, when large gatherings meant pulling the kitchen table into the living room (no formal dining room; we are informal people). We would add a few leaves to the table and were up and creating family traditions.

The tradition got a little tight the last time out. We did squeeze in and had a good time, but it’s obvious that we’ll need to reclaim the basement before we try the whole family in our house again.

Thank goodness in this issue, writer Ann Treacy talks to the expert at making small spaces work, Sarah Susanka, who gives great advice on basement and Not So Big remodels.

Not having all the family at home can leave a hole in the holidays. My nephew-in-law (one of the newest in our extending family) is in Iraq and will share Christmas with his military family. He will be missed here. Others face this separation or for other reasons cannot make it “home.”

But families spring up in many forms and many places as a couple of recent reunions - and a few stories in this issue - reminded me.

Our annual reunion of maternal cousins really counts as a sibling gathering, since we spent so many summers living at one aunt’s house or another. This close relation no doubt accounts for the wacky cartoons that appeared on my take-home restaurant box while I was elsewhere occupied; sisters and brothers are like that.

Another reunion involved folks from the old neighborhood - Duluth Heights - which is my current neighborhood, too, since we live in the house my dad built.

Former neighbors came from around the country for the event. Everyone brought stories of growing up in a place where we knew all of our neighbors and had likely gotten some needed mending or deserved scolding from whatever “mom” was closest after a childhood tumble or an indiscretion.

In our neighborhood, we even had Grandma and Grandpa Paukner at the end of our block, who had those names though they were not directly related to any of us. Grandma gave out the biggest Hershey’s bars at Halloween and Grandpa shoveled a huge mini-mountain in his back yard for us to shoot down with our snow saucers - my kind of grandparents, related by blood or not.

It grounds a person to gather among rarely seen, yet familiar faces and to realize that you and they still care about the lives into which we grew. If you’ve never had a reunion of your childhood neighbors, I highly recommend it. This small beginning for our neighborhood, I hope, will grow with more neighbors for the next gathering.

In this issue’s “Lake Superior Journal,” Publisher Paul Hayden introduces us to his furry and feathered neighbors … those adopted relatives that borrow part of his and Cindy’s hearts. Critters - domestic and more-or-less wild - easily become family in our part of the world and the woods.

Here also is a story encouraging aid to those who preserve our collective “family” history – our regional historical societies. The similarities of our past joins us in our present and our children’s future. These stories should never be lost.

And, of course, there’s our wonderful magazine family … the staff here and the readers (youse guys) out there. The reader surveys that you returned have been as generous as a huge hug with good “family friendly” suggestions. You can see who you (our readers) are in a reader summary in Behind the Pages. You live, literally, around the world.

Thank you for extending our family and for being such good neighbors (wherever you’ve landed).