Shalom Auslander shares a meditation on spending the holidays with friends:
My wife and I are estranged from our families and have been for some time. I dislike the word "estrange"; we have not (as the Dictionary of Etymology explains of the word) been made strange, or foreign. We checked out. We ran. Furthermore, I don’t mind strangers, or foreigners; I could share a meal with either and not feel like I want to kill them. Or myself.
We did not, from the Latin extraneus, become external. We bailed. We jumped. We split.
The Dish 