Does anyone have any stories they would like to share, where it might have been said that something-something “ruined christmas”
When I was in college, a friend of mine’s mom was just devastated that a local dog had come into their lawn and pretty much trampled/shredded their Nativity scene, and she explained that the damn dog ruined christmas.
One Christmas, when I was about 7, me and my older sister (who must have been around 9), had the stomach flu on Christmas day. So we spent the day laying on opposite ends of the sofa puking, and our parents spent the day cleaning it up, and our other 3 sisters got pretty much ignored. Not pleasant for anyone.
Our house burned on Christmas Eve when I was in the first grade. Mom managed to snatch a couple of the presents on her way out that she knew were clothes so we would have something besides pajamas and have a gift to open.
That Christmas sucked.
I think that set the tone for quite a few of my Christmases that followed.
My dad and I got in a screaming argument that ruined everything during present opening because he thought I was stupid for being “in love” with my girlfriend in the 11th grade. Funny, I thought I was 100% right back then, but 7 Christmases later and I see he was correct yet again 
My mother asked my father to leave on Christmas night.
The gathering at my aunt’s house was pretty tense. Dad was getting drunk, his relatives knew something was wrong & tried to pry it out of him. Mom got pissed at dad.
We drove home. Had to stop & pull the car over so dad could puke.
Mom then told me she was asking dad to leave. [this was sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back - there were other things going on before this that lead to the decline]
So yeah, that Christmas sucked.
Back in College, around 89 or 90, I was attempting a reconcilliation with my father. We had been on the outs for almost a year, and I thought it would have been a good time to let bygones be bygones. Boy, was I wrong. He showed up at my house (I lived with my mom) with my grandparents (his parents) two days before Christmas and basically told me I wasn’t welcome in their homes on Christmas. I didn’t speak to him again til last summer, and haven’t spoken to him since. I still haven’t spoken to my grandparents, and probably never will again.
That Christmas really sucked.
Well, I pretty much “ruined” Christmas for my folks one year.
I was seven or eight, and all I wanted for christmas that year was a strawberry shortcake doll. (It was a stupid doll that was popular in the 80’s.) All I could think about was this doll, so on Christmas day, 4 am, I got up, looked at the presents. It had to be there. I thought it had to be that big one on the right, so I opened it! Nope, nothing. I opened another. Nothing. I opened all my presents, still not there! So I started opening my brother’s presents.
Nothing. I didn’t get the doll.
Boy, were my parents were pissed.
Well, there was that time I was invited to a vegetarian Christmas dinner… Oops! Wrong thread!
hehehhee, j/k
My worst Christmas was the first one I had after moving from MI to Colorado. I was living with my best friend’s girlfriend (I’m female, at the time my best friend was male) and they were so stupidly in love that they basically forgot about everything except each other. The girlfriend, I’ll call her C, was house sitting a house in the mountains, and we all thought it would be fun to have Christmas dinner there. I had to work Christmas Eve, so the two of them said they’d take care of buying stuff for Christmas dinner.
I got a call at about 10 am Christmas morning, before I headed up to the mountains. “Um,” they say “We didn’t get to the grocery store until late last night, and we hadn’t realized that grocery stores close early on Christmas Eve, so could you stop at whatever store you can find and bring us some food? We’re starving, and there’s nothing in the house.”
I ended up buying Christmas dinner at the equivalent of a 7-11. Not only that, but they did a really good job of making me feel like a third wheel the whole day. They were in love, they wanted to spend the day in bed, and it was quite obvious.
Interestingly enough, my worst Thanksgiving happened with them, too. It was the same year, and we had invited a bunch of people over for Thanksgiving dinner. These were people we barely knew, since we’d only lived in the area for 3-4 months. They ate Thanksgiving dinner with her sitting on his lap. Halfway through the meal, they got up and went to her bedroom, which was right off the living room/dining room area in our small apartment, and commenced to have very loud sex.
It was quite uncomfortable to try to have small talk with a bunch of people I didn’t know well, with them going at it ten feet away.
Age 5.
My parents get me a parakeet (I have absolutely no idea why - I never asked for it). My father says, “Come on outside, we’ll see if it can fly.” My mother says, “Don’t do that. It’ll fly away.” My Dad, who is a very intelligent guy, says “No, they clip their wings at the pet store.”
We go outside. Dad takes the bird out. It flies away.
The story of the parakeet that flew away gets told every single solitary Christmas at my house.
BRB
I don’t have one, but this is my husband’s - age 5, he decides he wants to see Santa Claus. So he creeps downstairs and hides behind the Christmas tree, and waits. Sure enough, he eventually hears something - and he peeks and sees his parents bringing in the presents to put under the tree. He stands up and screams, “You lied to me!” His dad starts yelling and screaming back at him, and it’s basically an ugly scene.
Well, when I was in the fifth grade, I caught herpes (the oral kind, you pervs–HSV-1) in the worst way. I had sores all over my lips, the inside of my mouth, and (eew) down my esophagus. I spent a couple of weeks with a fever that hovered between 102-105 degrees and actually wound up in the emergency room on Christmas Eve. I lost about 20 pounds because I couldn’t eat anything but milkshakes, and that was only when I was lucid.
That pretty much sucked. Much worse than the Christmas I discovered Santa Claus = Mom.
I don’t have any from childhood but I do have one from three years ago that put an end to my grandmother having christmas at her house.
You see as of today I am thirty-one years old and my uncles wife still feels that I am ten even though I have been married for seven years and have five children that I have kept alive for thirteen years.
I understand that bringing five children with me everywhere can be quiet overwhelming for people who aren’t used to children or that many of them.
Everybody else in my family stopped at two children.
Anyway before we got there my grandmother had asked my aunt (we will call her and Btch from now on) to help her run interference and keep things under control.
Aunt Btch decides that this means she has run of the house and proceeded to tell myself, my brother and my sister that our children are to remain in the toy room and each child will have a parent with them at all times.
Hello?! I have five! My sister was single and she had two, and my brother and his wife were the only ones set with one parent per child.
Aunt B*tch of course at that time had an 18 year old and a three year old monster.
So there we all sat in the toy room with our children while hers stayed out visiting with friends and family.
Well, the little monster would wander in every once in a while and be well, a monster. Teasing our children and taking away toys.
So, loud enough for everyone in the house to hear (two or three wine coolers later) I tell him that he cannot be in the toy room with us unless his mother or father came with him so he needed to go.
She ruled over the present opening as well. As soon as the children opened their gifts I took them out the the car and we said our goodbyes and left. We didn’t even eat.
I haven’t talked to my uncle or his wife since.
My grandmother won’t have christmas anymore and even if she did I don’t think I would put my children through that again.
I also think she heard me ask my 6’4", 210 brother to pile drive her the next time she came in the room to “check-up” on us to make sure we were watching our children.
It had to be when Dawn flew into a rage over not getting her cha-cha heels and knocked the tree over. Mom was bawling “not on Christmas” and dad… oh, I’m channeling John Waters movies again.
I never took Christmas disasters personally as a kid. One year at the Christmas eve party everyone was at my grandfolk’s house and my grandpa and most of my uncles were getting drunk as hell and anbout to start brawling. My dad was always a light drinker so we moved the whole friggin’ mess to our house. Another year at my grandfolk’s place my favorite uncle on my mom’s side was getting really, really drunk for apparently the first time in his life. He took me outside to sit on the porch to sit and explain to me the stunning insights to the nature of the world and the human psyche that only drunks seem to get. I didn’t get it. I was confused and cold. This was a new insight to the effects of alcohol for me as I mostly associated it with my other uncles getting into fights. He was staying with my folks at the time so mom and dad drug him home and the next morning mom found him sitting in a tub full of ice cold water. She got him upright and dressed and a few minutes later he shambled into the living room and fell face down onto the toys my brother and I were playing with. We played around him as if nothing had happened.
When I was engaged to my high school sweetheart I asked where we should spend the Christmas holiday, eve at her house and day at my house or what. She was apprehensive and said there might be a problem with her grandparents. I jokingly asked how bad they could be and she said “it’s not that, it’s the racial thing.” Coulda knocked me over with a feather. My dad is of Mexican heritage and my mom is anglo but it was something I have never ever given though to because it was such a non-issue in our family. My then fiancee was as Norwegian blonde as you can get. It’s the closest thing to racial bigotry I’ve ever personally faced and it hit me kind of hard. We broke up and in retrospect it was a good thing. My own family would never do that but if they did that with someone I loved enough to marry I’d tell them in no uncertain terms exactly how they can kiss my ass.
Now I have a very blonde, midwestern, all-American girl fiancee and her family loves me as much as my family loves her. Time to go home to her. 
Well, it would probably be the time the christmas tree, unbeknownst to anyone, sheltered a praying mantis egg case. The eggs disgorged dozens of baby praying mantises to scurry about the house.
I, being about nine at the time, was highly amused.
My parents, less so.
As a young boy, the neighborhood psychiatrist asked me if I would direct the school Christmas play. I tried my best, but… well, the kids just wouldn’t cooperate. The rehearsal was an utter disaster. Good grief.
Then I decided that we needed a Christmas tree. I could have gotten a nice, big, healthy tree, but I was rather sickened by how commercial Christmas had become. There was this dinky little tree that caught my eye, though… a tiny little thing that was shedding pine needles everywhere. I decided that it needed a home, so it was the one which I chose.
That did not go over well. The other kids positively hated it, and pretty much laughed in my face.
I thought maybe if I spruced it up, it’d look a lot better. However, no sooner did I hang the first ornament, when… urk! I killed it. The poor little thing was too weak and scrawny to make a decent Christmas tree.
I felt like such a blockhead.
December 23, 1998 my exhusband came home from TAD and told me he wanted a divorce.
Yeah, that sucked.
Hmmmm…I’ve ruined two Christmases, I’ll leave it to you to vote on which was worse.
<1> 8th grade. I told my parents that I was going to a friend’s house for a Christmas party and would be back in a couple hours. Instead, my friends and I all snuck off to my family’s garage to drink and smoke pot. This was a perfect place to party growing up, b/c it was far enough from the house that you could see my parents coming a mile away and get away out the other door before they even knew you were in there. So there we were, watching the house and drinking and smoking dirtweed pinners like the delinquents that we were, when the garage door suddenly opened and we were flooded with the headlights of my grandparents’ car. My parents told me they weren’t coming - their visit was a surprise for the grandkids. I was surprised, alright. My friends scattered like rats while I was dragged into the house to face the music. Especially wonderful was the fact that this was their first exposure to the fact their “little angel” was really a 13 year-old punk that drank and smoked pot.
<2> Junior in High School. I had sex with my girlfriend on the downstairs hide-a-bed couch, Christmas Eve, both of us drunk. We both passed out. Very early the next morning, (Christmas Day), her father called my parents worried sick to find out if she was there, my parents checked my room, said I wasn’t home either. Panic ensued. Dad started calling all our friends’ parents (and disturbing them on Christmas Day) while Mom went on with her usual Christmas morning by carrying all the presents downstairs to put under the tree, where we were discovered. Naked. Every possible horrible outcome from such a situation came true - my parents losing all respect for her, (they loved her before this), ditto her parents losing all respect for me, my religious grandparents - did I mention in the first story that they were religious? - disgraced that I was having premarital intercourse…at the age of 17!!, my father having to call everyone back and explain that we were downstairs, and that she had spent the night, (a HUGE no-no), me driving her home and being greeted with a pleasant Christmas “Don’t ever see my daughter again”, my oh-so understanding brothers making things 100 times worse by prodding my parents about it all day, plus we both reeked of alcohol and I was crashingly hungover. To this day, they have no sense of humor whatsoever about this incident.
Our best beloved dog died on December 19, 1999, without warning. Then we both got sick, and we still had to do the bulk of planning for our New Year’s Eve costume party. That party wasn’t as much fun as we had hoped.
The Christmas after my parents divorced. My mother started a new job just before Christmas and had absolutely no money to buy presents. Christmas morning all me and my 2 younger brothers and 2 younger sisters received were a pair of socks and a note that more would come when my mother got a paycheck. That afternoon we went to my father’s place and he gave each of us a $20 bill. Later we went to my grandmother’s. My older brother lived with her at the time and he showed off all the stuff Grandma bought him for Christmas but we got nothing.
The real kick in the teeth was when my mother got her child support check the next month. My dad deducted the $100 he gave us kids for Christmas.