Bringing your partner home for the holidays will always be fraught with some amount of awkwardness. You can only keep your boo and your family chatting about the weather and work for so long, and then there's the issue of the, er, sleeping arrangements . But if your parents have no chill about letting you and your long-term, cohabitating S.O. share a bed in their house, just be grateful they aren't resorting to "bundling," the circa-1700s practice of birth-controlled bed-sharing.If you're familiar with bundling, it's probably thanks to The Patriot, which featured a scene in which a young Heath Ledger is being stitched into what looks like a human-sized pillowcase in order to share a bed with a young lady. This is actually a pretty accurate depiction of the practice . Back in the day, young men who were courting a lady (or just looking for a place to snooze) would be allowed to sleep in the same bed as said lady — just as long as they had a thick barrier of clothing, blankets, or, yes, body sacks, to keep them separated through the night. In some cases, a wooden board would even be erected, to divide the bed into two sections. (Feel free to take a break if this is all getting too sexy for you.)Bundling was most likely brought to America by early European settlers, and it became such a trend in 18th-century New England that an incredibly thorough physician named Henry Reed Stiles wrote a book in 1861 about the history of the practice, all the way back to its roots in tribal Europe. To put it lightly, the guy was not a fan. "Bundling — that ridiculous and pernicious custom which prevailed among the young to a degree which we can scarcely credit," he writes, "sapped the fountain of morality and tarnished the escutcheons of thousands of families." In other words, young people and their dirty minds will find their way around anything, even a solid wooden board.