I just came by to pin a little ribbon on you for an excellent comment. Thanks.

In reply to this comment by raverman:
It happened at the same time we built suburbia, and everyone had to live in the same nuclear family, in the same style 3 bedroom house.

It stopped being acceptable to have a different lifestyle, because as a culture we became so obsessed with "owning" things, cars, houses. We no longer had jobs but had to have long term "careers"

Even though the nomadic life style has been natural to humans for thousands of years, we grouped homeless people with druggies, alcoholics, criminals, and mentally retarded.

and as with most oppressed minorities - as we marginalized and ostracized them - they became what we expected of them.

It happened at the same time we built suburbia, and everyone had to live in the same nuclear family, in the same style 3 bedroom house.

It stopped being acceptable to have a different lifestyle, because as a culture we became so obsessed with "owning" things, cars, houses. We no longer had jobs but had to have long term "careers"

Even though the nomadic life style has been natural to humans for thousands of years, we grouped homeless people with druggies, alcoholics, criminals, and mentally retarded.

and as with most oppressed minorities - as we marginalized and ostracized them - they became what we expected of them.

As the product of a single mother I loathe Ann Coulter even more after seeing this.

The problem is that compassion and family values have gone out the window. It is not because of the Single Mother. They have a harder time succeeding at parenting, because they have half the workforce to get there.

Supporting single mothers and acknowledging that it is hard is not glorifying or romanticizing their long lonely road. Ann Coulter seems like she didn't get enough love from her nuclear family.

the US has experienced a type of urban and suburbanization that the rest of the world is not familiar with, creating populations of destitute and poorly socialized people. These factors lead to the increased joblessness, violence, drug abuse, breakdown of the nuclear family, etc. This may explain why US cities dominate ^ this list.

Exactly, what she said ^ about the kids and the gifts... if its a big family, extended or otherwise, and cash is strapped, just focus on the kids. This is what my extended family has done (which really isn't that big compared to some, but still), primarily our nuclear families exchange gifts privately xmas day, and the night before when the extended clan gets together the only gifts that are exchanged (aside from some small sweets and treats among my mom and her sibs) are between grandma and grandkids, and everyone spoils the two grandchildren that are actually still children (they're 6 and 9, the rest of us are in college or older, there was a huge age disparity between my one aunt and the rest of her sibs, so her kids are still pretty young)... but basically, we all came to this recognition several years ago that the gift giving was not what we should focus on and that xmas should be for kids... and anyway we adult grandkids were just like "whatever, the only thing we really want is someone to pay our credit cards off, but that's not gonna happen so we'll just settle for spending time together".

Take a dozen Brat Darts, a mooch whistle, and five cases of the Nuclear Family love grenades, please.