Family time:

How do we spend family time together? Does this mean what we do when we are at home & have nothing to do? We watch TV, read books, play cards & talk.
Perhaps I can explain it more by telling you how my family spends the evenings: my mother is retired now so she is home most of the afternoons. My dad comes home at 5 pm. & that's usually when every family member is home. We, unlike most other families, have dinner in early evening. & the dinner usually takes an hour since everybody talks about their day & stuff. Then I usually come to my room & others watch TV or read books depending on the situation. My dad likes to play cards a lot. So it is a family tradition of ours to play in the evenings. & most of the time my mom & I play against dad & my sister. Sometime dad plays with Fabiulla (my sister) or my mother. Spades is one of our favorites & I like to play hearts too. We play other games too like poker, 21 & some other games that I don’t know the English word for. Backgammon is game originated in ancient Iran & is very popular though I rather playing chess when it comes to play board games. In family gatherings we play bingo a lot.
Hmmm... This post has turned into a post about games more than spending family times together! My folks don’t like to go out very much. We rather stay home & chat away the evening than going to a restaurant, Movie Theater or something. When I was younger, we used to go to movies & watch kid-movies but nowadays we prefer to watch CDs at home. Instead of eating out, my parents prefer to order food & have it in the quite of the house where we can easily talk. Going to theaters though is different... once in while we would watch a good one in the main city theater hall.
Weekends which is considered family time too, is usually spent with my close relatives. We hardly stay home at weekends. If the weather would be nice, we would go out to my aunt's mansion in Alborz Mountains. & if it is not, the whole bunch of us, would gather in one of the houses. So on weekends either you are a guest or you entertain them.
What else? Oh, yeah, my parents *love* to shop together... even for smallest things they would go out together. My dad is known for his extraordinary shopping habits though; he might buy the most useless objects & find a *use* for it while my mom tends to buy the most useful ones & not really using them. Well, they are quite a pair!