A few years after my parents seperated my mom said she wanted to “try again”. By now, my father had moved to another city about nine hours away. He was thrilled and excited to be “given another chance”.
She took the bus out there (she’s afraid to fly). Hours before she was supposed to arrive, my father’s appendix burst and he underwent emergency surgery.
She arrived and was miserable. She called me and said she had made a terrible mistake and wanted to come home. Dad called and asked if I could fly out and keep her company. I did.
Then I got to drive them both back here (I am the only kid that can drive a standard) so my mom could once again leave my Dad. Nine hours of him being in pain with a still open wound, and my Mom in stony silence on bad winter roads in the grip of a miserably cold prairie winter.
None of mine were especially horrible, but in late 2003 we were planning a big Hanukkah party, which we hadn’t had in a while. One of my good friends who I hadn’t seen much of lately was going to be there with her family, we were going to play games, I was thrilled.
We went out to Target that morning for some last-minute party supplies in my dad’s (small) car and promptly got T-boned by a Chevy Tahoe. The worst injury any of us suffered was me scraping up my face when the side curtain airbag burst next to me. I think that airbag saved me from a far more serious injury, but my mom looked at the scrapes and thought I had bruised my jaw. “I’m fine, Mom, nothing hurts and everything works like usual.” “No, you’re in shock.” So I got strapped to a stretcher and jostled around in the back of a fire engine on the way to the ER, where I had to wait another, horrible, carsick hour for a doctor to come by, pronounce me fit as a fiddle, and unstrap me.
Mom’s stress really got to her and she stayed in the hospital, afraid something had happened to her hip (it hadn’t), for several hours.
Needless to say there was no Hanukkah party. I think we just lit the menorah and ate leftovers.
Four years abroad can lead to some pretty depressing holidays. I think my first Christmas day in China was a school day like any other, and after class I went downtown and wandered around a bit on my own before getting too depressed, heading home and spending the rest of the night asleep.
I think it was the Easter weekend. Went to visit the (horrible) girlfriend who lived with some (horrible) realitives. Ate a pizza friday night, got food poisioning. Spent the next 2 days sick as a dog between the couch and the toilet, with little kids running around and screaming all day.
My car got towed because I was too sick to even remember to move it. The tow company ransacked it and stole a bunch of shit. Got a ticket and impound fees.
orderfire: So what did you eat that night? Convenience store hotdogs? Whatever you could scrabble together in the kitchen? And great that they could leave a note instead of calling you back (bro did leave a contact number, right? They’re supposed to ask for one).
It didn’t exactly improve after that. We found another place that was serving a prix fixe TGD. We decided that something was better than nothing, and were seated. The meal was totally disappointing - puny servings and subpar institutional preparation - we’d probably have been better off at the local senior center. As we picked at the remains, we noticed a figure outside the window we were seated next to. A miserable-looking homeless guy was staring at us.
Add guilt, regret and self-loathing to the mix and it really made for a memorable holiday. Headed home in the rain, on the bus.
(The new employee hadn’t taken a contact #…I wonder if they kept their job?)
Having read the stories upthread, my tale seems spoiled and whiny by comparison. Clearly everyone has a different experience of disappointment and tragedy.
Speaking now as a card-carrying member of the Holiday Haters Club, I realize that much of the disappointment we felt was rooted in unrealistic expectations of some glowing Norman Rockwell fantasy of magical holiday joy.
SNORT.
I know better now, and boycott the whole charade.
giggle Last Christmas I came down with a fever of 103 on December 23. My parents were going to make an 8-hour drive to visit us, and I wavered overnight about whether it was worth having them come down. In the end, we all decided it was, so they came.
I spent all night Christmas Eve sitting up on the sofa, coughing, trying to drowse and keep breathing at the same time.
On Christmas day, I cooked Christmas dinner with the fever and a sinus infection and (what a doctor later told me was) strep throat. I was so stuffed up, I couldn’t taste the dinner.
I don’t know that I feel particularly disappointed about it all. Being sick usually makes me giggle pretty soon after the fact. At least nobody caught anything from my Christmas dinner.
I’ve usually had lame birthdays. My birthday is January 23.
As a kid, I’d already gotten all the toys I wanted for Christmas the previous month. Plus, we lived in the Midwest during most of that time and inevitably it would snow on the day of my birthday party, which would limit the number of kids who could attend a party since many friends had to be driven to our house.
In high school, that was always exam time.
In college, the new semester had just started and most people were broke after paying tuition and books
As an adult, they’ve gotten better. I’ve usually combined my birthday with an NFL playoff watching party. Also, I am off work for Martin Luther King day, so I usually can combine a birthday celebration with a long weekend.
Mine have never been nearly as bad as all of yours, but there was the year when I got braces the day before Thanksgiving (apparently it was between that and the day before Christmas, so it wasn’t much of a choice). I couldn’t eat anything that night, and it was only marginally better on T-day. I did manage to find two back molars that didn’t hurt whenever anything touched them, so I spent the entire dinner shoving food back there and trying to maneuver it around my mouth. Not tragic, but still pretty lame.
FrigidLizard, I feel you. It would have been a lot better if he had just said “you probably won’t be getting any candy this year,” instead of making a promise he couldn’t keep. You had every right to feel stiffed.
So many Thanksgiving stories… as mine is too. Mine seems a bit lame though by comparison.
Early '80’s and I was a poor college student. I also had recently taken a keen interest in cooking but had a limited budget. I had been awaiting the beloved Thanksgiving dinner and after driving 2 hours back was met at the door by my Dad who told me Mom had come down with the Flu. Not a worry, my Dad was a master griller and I knew he had a freezer full of prime angus steaks in the basement from my Grandfather’s farm in Iowa. I then found out he didn’t want to “disappoint” me by not having turkey. So he proudly served us two Swanson’s TV dinners. They even had all the groceries in the fridge ready to go… and I would have loved the opportunity to cook them.
I really wanted to post in the other thread, but realized I got nothin’. My memories that make me smile? I get a good feeling from some, but there’s not a smile to be found.
So here’s my last Halloween. I knew it was to my last. I wasn’t allowed to go with my friends or alone, we lived in a really small town, but there was no way I would be allowed out after dark alone, there would have to be an adult. I got dressed, I was 9, so I could do this all by myself. My Mom got home from teaching and she went off. I was dressed as a witch, black hat, black dress, she went into a tirade on Bewitched and the occult. I was struck dumb, finally burst into tears and she wandered away after running out of steam. I know that she would have previously agreed to my outfit and that we were going. My Dad then took me around in a car. We didn’t go to anyone we knew, for some reason. I imagine now it was because my face was so swollen from crying. He and I barely spoke in the car. I’m sure I thanked him, but it was the Suckiest Halloween ever.
I hated most Christmases & Thanksgivings, my Mom would invite a stranger or someone that didn’t have family. It was a nice gesture, but then I had to be on my best behavior and dressed in itchy church clothes. It was never relaxing or fun.
Well, mine is positively shallow for this thread but I’ll share anyway.
As a kid, I truly believed in Santa Claus. Other kids would say they had “figured it out” and he wasn’t real and I’d just nod my head to show I agreed but inside, I knew they were so wrong. After all, I was gifted (you know, like every third kid born in the 1970s whose parents wanted to feel important) so I was obviously just smarter than they were.
I loved Christmas and everything about Santa to the point that after my November birthday, I could think about nothing but.
Anyway, my little brother has always been a present snooper, always trying to shake wrapped gifts, looking in closets, etc. So one year, he finds my mom’s stash of “Santa” gifts–complete with tags that say “From: Santa” attached. He comes and tells me that he knows Santa is not real because of this find. I nod like always and think how clever it was of my mom to write that on the tags just to throw my brother off or punish/trick him if he found them.
My mom finds out and is upset that my little brother has had his Santa illusions shattered so young–he was probably 5 years old. So she comes to me for help. She says, “Okay, now I know that you know that there is no Santa and it’s just your parents but I want you to pretend for the sake of your brother…”
I was absolutely crushed. Devastated. I felt like I had been punched. I remember just nodding to her and then going off to my room to cry for hours. What makes it even worse is that there was still some part of me that thought maybe my mom was wrong or lying to trick me somehow. On Christmas eve that year, I lay in bed, crying, listening to my parents putting together some stupid talking toy for my brother that sure enough, Christmas morning said “From: Santa” on the tag.
It was several years later before I would look forward to Christmas again.
I was in my first, last, and only miserable year of grad school. Coincidentally, it was also the first, last, and only full year of my miserable first marriage. We were feeling too poor and/or cheap to fly to my parents’ place for the holiday (my ex’s family weren’t an option for cultural and geographical reasons). The next closest relatives were 6 hours away, and it didn’t occur to anyone that we should try to visit them, anyway.
My ex and I, having lived in and around major urban centers, naively assumed that we’d be able to find a restaurant open around the dinner hour on Thanksgiving. This is a very unwise assumption in a small town whose only major industry is a university. The grocery stores were closed by then, so we couldn’t even buy the ingredients for a festive dinner. We drove around in the rain for an hour until we found a pizza place that was still open. Pizza and soda - happy fucking Thanksgiving!
This is easily the most depressing thing I’ve read in my 7 years here. My vague yearly holiday angst shouldn’t even be allowed to share a thread with things like death, illness, poverty, family dissolution, rage, solitude, barley loaf and, …gifts of conscience for all the little Indian boys and girls.
I’ve had several holidays that in theory should have sucked, like the years I’ve had to work Thanksgiving or Christmas and spent the day being bitched at by customers about how I’m ruining their family holiday celebration*, or the Christmas my dad wound up in the CCU and had bypass surgery a couple days later. Overall, though, those were mostly pretty good days, once you excerpted the one specific shitty part. Even the ER didn’t happen until about 9 Christmas night, and up till then it had been a perfectly nice family holiday.
The only one that really stands out as being disappointing was Thanksgiving a few years ago. His family had pulled that last-second plan change thing that makes me want to bludgeon them (they’re lovely people, really, but that one trait really pushes my buttons) and moved dinner an hour away on a day that I was on emergency call and couldn’t leave town. He went for various family political reasons, which left me by myself all day. I was perfectly willing to make my own dinner during the day as I’d done before, but he simply wouldn’t have it. Nothing would do but that I sit around all day alone, and then start cooking when he finally dragged home. There being nothing on tv and nobody to hang out with, I spent the day doing yard work, and by the time he was home I was tired. We didn’t eat until after 8, and there was the standard Thanksgiving kitchen destruction waiting for me after that…it was the shittiest holiday I’ve ever had.
*When you are taking advantage of some place of business being open on Thanksgiving or Christmas, and there’s a line because 10,000 other people are doing the same thing or things are not just exactly how you’d do them at home, don’t take your annoyance out on the staff. I assure you that they’re not destroying your holiday enjoyment 1/100 as much as you’re destroying theirs. So BE NICE.
Christmas 2008 was the lamest. I was living in Boston and supposed to fly out to Las Vegas to have Christmas with my extended family out there. My flight was originally planned for the night of 12/21, but when I got to the airport, I found it had been canceled due to snow. The next available flight was at 6 am on Christmas morning, so that’s what I had to take.
I had to take a taxi to the airport since the trains don’t run at 4:30. On the way to the airport, the driver ran over a median strip and blew his tire out, so I had to wait 20 minutes for a replacement taxi. I was beside myself thinking I’m going to miss my flight, but I got to the airport in reasonable time and made it. Because of the high winds across the US, the plane ended up running low on fuel and had to make an emergency landing in Denver. Of course, once we get back in the air, we’re late, and I miss my connecting flight in Long Beach, CA for Vegas. They put me on the next flight, but it turns out I was given the same seat number as someone else. I sat in the last seat in the last row and prayed to a god I don’t believe in that I get to stay on the plane. My stress level is off the charts at this point. (Did I mention I hate flying to begin with?) I do get to stay on the plane, and I finally arrive in Las Vegas at 9:00 pm on Christmas Day, having missed everyone’s dinner celebration. Most of the family left the next morning, and my return flight was two days later. What a waste of time and blood pressure.
My story’s not nearly as sad as some of these, but it definitely traumatized me for life.
Second grade. My birthday was coming up. My mother insisted that if I was going to have a party I had to invite the whole class, all thirty kids, otherwise I wasn’t being fair. I told her that nobody liked me and I didn’t want to invite everyone, but she wouldn’t let me pick who to invite. Had to be everyone. So I went to class with my little invitations for everyone and handed them out, like a good little girl.
A week or so later came the birthday party. Mom has the cake, goody bags, party hats, all ready to go. Party games set up, a table full of food, and me in my pretty purple birthday dress.
Two girls showed up.
Two.
One of them was my friend, one was probably forced to attend because her mother made her go.
I didn’t cry or make a scene or anything, but later that night I cried and cried. My mom felt horrible and never forced a big party on me ever again. I guess she didn’t realize what an unpopular dork her little girl was.
This is why I’m having a very hard time figuring out what to do for my 30th birthday in a couple of weeks. I would like to celebrate, but deep down I’m sure everyone has something better to do and I don’t want to make a big deal out of it.
On Thanksgiving day 2003 Dad went into the hospital and never came back out.
But I’m kind of glad he went in that day. It was his last lucid day. I spent most of the day with him talking and I would have been sad if I had not had that time.
