Christmas time is here is a classic carol heard this time of year in almost every store. It sings of “happiness and cheer,” “families growing near” and wishing the spirit of Christmas lasted all year.

That’s all fine and dandy if your holidays are full of happiness and cheer. But when they’re full of bickering, you definitely don’t want them to last all year.

Families can be a pretty diverse crowd. With people living longer, divorce rates in the United States around 40-50 percent, and remarriage or cohabitation leading to blended families, the holidays can become a melting pot of generational gaps, hurt feelings, and people sitting in the corner, feeling left out.

It isn’t hard to imagine the potential tensions. Toss in a few dissenting religious and political beliefs and you’ve got an episode of Jerry Springer.

The holidays are supposed to be a time for coming together and goodwill towards all. But when the holiday season starts with the murder of three over an Xbox on Black Friday, goodwill seems to be the furthest from people’s minds.

It seems that each year, the violence surrounding the start of a supposedly joyous season just gets worse.  A woman was trampled at a Wal-Mart, a fight broke out over a parking space which resulted in someone getting stabbed, and would-be robbers shot a man while trying to take his newly purchased television.

If this is how we choose to treat complete strangers, it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to believe that the people we know best, our family, will be treated just as badly.

Ok, maybe that’s an exaggeration. While there is a good amount of familial violence around the holidays, it isn’t as bad as the Black Friday madness. But, the wounds left from holiday mudslinging can hurt all the same.

Jabs about how smart one’s child is, how much money one made, or someone’s happy marriage have a tendency to leave marks on the soul.

What happened to a families gathering around the Christmas tree, catching up, laughing, and being genuinely happy to spend time together?

Suck it up people! If not for yourselves, than for everyone else who takes time out of their busy lives to get together, often only this one time each year.

Everyone is different. That’s what makes life so interesting. Everyone follows a different life path, has different opinions and ideas, and finds different things fulfilling. But we all have one thing in common. We’re all family.

Embrace your differences. Learn something new from someone else’s differences. Have a lively, yet civil, debate about politics or religion, keeping in mind that everyone is entitled to their opinion. Heck, someone might change your mind, or, better yet, you might find that you have something in common with someone you never imagined.

This holiday season, I urge everyone to reconnect with family. You have 364 other days to hate each other. Embrace the true Christmas spirit and love each other for your differences for just one day.