Everyone knows.....

We had an open house on saturday and of course no one showed up. Apparently everyone in the world knew that open houses were only supposed to be on Sunday's except us. We had this conversation about 5 times over the last week...

Us: "Yeah we're having an open house on saturday.."
Everyone else in the world: "Hmm really a saturday open house?"
Us: "Why, is that bad?"
Everyone else in the world: "Well typically saturdays don't work for open houses"
Us: "Why is that?"
Everyone else in the world: "I don't know, that's just the way everyone does it"

It really amazes me sometimes how so many people can know something that I've never heard of, and most of them have no idea why they believe it. For instance, my wife's aunt once told us that she was worried that our oldest daugter was "liver grown". She was very serious about this and very worried about it. I asked her what that was, and she had absolutely no idea other than the fact that it was really bad. Apparently this is something that was spawned years ago that has been passed down as truth through the generations and no one knows were it comes from. All they know is that if a baby's hand can't reach it's foot behind it's back then they must be "liver grown", and that's really bad. Of course I spoiled all the fun of worrying by asking questions like...

"What does that mean?"
"How do you know that this is a real medical condition?"
"What doctor told you about this?"

My final conclusion was at some point in the past someone was running out of things to worry about and therefore invented this horrible condition in order to fill that void in their life. The amazing part is that several generations after whoever it was still believe it to this day.

Just for the record, although I tease my aunt about this, I love her dearly and she is all you could ask for in an aunt-in-law, this one incident is just a great example of how things get decided, and "everyone knows" scenarios get started without anyone knowing why. I figure the first open house was on a sunday because the people were just busy on saturday and so now they all HAVE to be on sundays, just because.

Oh well, you really do learn something new everyday...