There's a Scots word I think about a lot this time of year, memt, roughly translated in old dictionaries as "connected by blood, alliance or friendship." It's in this particular old dictionary sandwiched between memorials and mending. It's a few words before menage, which the text helpfully informs us is "a local benefit club among neighbors," and, one hopes, a combination of mutual aid society and queer polycule.
At least as it was conveyed to me memt is basically being bound by blood whether born or shed, encompassing people you have that level of bond with regardless of how you got there. I've always liked it.
Some of the people society told me to consider family weren't, in any way. Some absolutely were. Plenty of others I met along the way, in frays metaphorical and sometimes all too real.
Anyway, I know I ain't the only one. This is a bleak season for too many of us, work and compulsory revelry taking a toll when we're already scraped thin. So here's a reminder that we don't have to hold connections just because, once upon a time, we were forced to. We can cut, we can mend. There are always other pacts to forge.