Today, Americans return to school and work after the long Thanksgiving weekend. How did you get along with your family, especially your siblings, over the holiday? Do you remember any moments of competing for attention? What about food? In "Sibling Rivalry: One Long Food Fight," George Howe Colt writes: As one of four brothers, I grew up in a veritable petri dish for sibling rivalry. In most families, sibling rivalry softens with time. Over the years, Colt brother dinner table gatherings grew increasingly civilized, although vestiges of the mealtime strategies honed in childhood have occasionally led to trouble in the wider world. When my older brother, Harry, traveling in India after college, was stricken with a mysterious gastrointestinal disease and lost 30 pounds, he suspects the culprit was a half-eaten Popsicle he found on the street and instinctively gobbled up before someone else got it. Our younger brothers, Ned and Mark, are convinced that their predilection-bordering-on-addiction for all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets stems from their childhood fears that there would be nothing left on the plate by the time their older brothers got through with it. A few years ago I came within a desperate wheeze of having the Heimlich maneuver performed on me while gorging on fist-size shrimp at a fancy holiday party. Some believe that siblings who express rivalry during their youth end up more closely bonded in adulthood than siblings who experience no rivalry. Show me a sibling who experiences no sibling rivalry, and I'll show you an only child. If the Colt brothers are any indication, there may be some truth to this. At Colt family dinners these days, we tend toward the kind of family tranquility Norman Rockwell depicted in his paintings. We still eat as if we were in a race - my wife says she'd never met anyone who ate as fast as I do, until she met my brothers - but there is no surreptitious pilfering of chicken skin (well, maybe a little), no wrestling over the last piece of pumpkin pie. Of course this may be because for some time now, we four brothers are likely to be the ones cooking. Not only do we love working in the kitchen together, but this way we can also make sure there will be more than enough food for us all. To what degree do you identify with Mr. Colt's description of eating dinner with his three brothers? Do you agree with his statement "Show me a sibling who experiences no sibling rivalry, and I'll show you an only child"? If you have siblings, do you concern yourselves with how much food, privileges or other things that are given to each brother or sister? If you don't have siblings, what have you observed about sibling rivalries from other families? Does your experience support or contradict Mr. Colt's ideas that sibling rivalry softens with time and that later in life, brothers and sisters who once competed with one another will be closer?