Answer:
A family holiday always begins, as it has done since my childhood, with me shouting "Bye, Auntie!" through the letterbox of our empty home, to confound any joint-casing burglars nearby. One great holiday constant is that foreigners take an awfully long time to eat, and a bored child in a restaurant is a grissini-jousting accident waiting to happen. The answer is charades – played under Avignon rules, with "family sayings" and "famous idiots" as additional categories. Somewhere in Umbria, they're still talking about my mother's interpretation of Blazing Saddles.
Step-by-step explanation: