Well my family was always pretty poor so thank goodness for my great grandmother who really basically raise me and my sisters. Well my father was a drunk and my mom never went to college but my great grandmother worked so hard throughout her life. she worked for 43 years at a company that was a job for men! But yeah there was dysfunction growing up which also led to me being in group homes owned by the state and it was mostly due to me wanting a relationship with my dad but he was a heavy drinker and thus the state deemed me in danger so I was taken away by police (on more occasions than I can remember). I found this site on a google search because I remember a Christmas when I was about 10 yrs old and my great grandmother bought like 25 gifts each for both of my sisters and when I asked for my gifts she said she though I wouldn’t be there for the holiday. I felt like shit… It was horrible because my grama always favored me and took me fishing and to McDonalds and church. I can also remember being really little and I saw an advertisement for a fishing lure called the zip lure and I called her up and asked her to get it but she had already ordered it! That was a damn good lure I caught huge fish with it! looking back now I got way more than I deserved always from her. but I was just searching online to see other ppls stories because I’m always interested in everything. But yeah this totally happened and it was horrible!
Not me, but some cousins. An aunt of mine has always had problems with alcohol and drugs and has 4 kids. She has never, ever bought them presents for Christmas. Instead, everyone else in the family would buy them something and leave the gifts at my grandmother’s house. Some years, she’d call the week before Christmas in hysterics, demanding the gifts so her kids would get something, angry everyone hadn’t dropped them off yet. Other years, they’d sit in the living room for weeks after New Years, waiting for her to come get them.
One year, the presents sat in my grandmother’s living room until mid-February, and I thought “Wow, they’re just now getting their presents? That’s messed up.” Ah, poor, naïve, epbrown01. Turns out my grandmother got tired of waiting and stored their Christmas presents in a closet - my cousins got them during a family barbecue for the Kentucky Derby that May.
Yes, but I brought it on myself. I was a nosy little shit. Thought I was slick and opened my presents a week before Xmas, then rewrapped them, fully believing Mom wouldn’t know.
Ooh! Roller skates! A new wristwatch!
The presents stayed under the tree until Xmas Day, when they disappeared. I asked what happened - Mom said “You know” and nothing else.
I received all my wrapped Xmas presents five months later for my birthday, still wrapped in Xmas paper, and nothing for my birthday.
Close…almost, but not really? One year my brother and I got one big gift each: he got a TV and I got an electric guitar with a little amp. Three or four months later when we got home from school they were gone. Drawers were pulled out, things were scattered around. Our mother said “We were robbed!” My brother really lamented that little TV; he’d loved laying in bed watching it at night. He asked me if I thought they’d ever catch the burglar and he’d get his TV back. I said “Don’t be stupid. They were repossessed.”
Huh. I believe you, but what were you basing that on?
Possibly our car that got repossessed and that she was a “paper hanger”; wrote bad checks for a living.
Ah, I see.
I know this is an old thread.
When I was 15. I got nothing for Christmas, but my three siblings did.
Days before…I watched my siblings so my mom could get gifts. I wrapped the gifts. My siblings and I ran to the tree Christmas morning. My mom and her new boyfriend *2 months) were still in bed.
I separated gifts by name and handed to the kids…I think my brother ran to wake my mom.
Nothing for me. I accused my brother of raking and hidibg…saying he was funny.
My mom came in and said since I was the oldest that I should understand. They didn’t have a lot if money this year.
My parents were separated and divorcing and my dad had paid tons of child support. We lived in an upper class neighbirhood. My dad had recently lost his job. A few months earlier I had been in a terrible accident and nearly died. I still wasn’t quite well.
My mother said that since I had a boyfriend he surely would have a gift for me…while my siblings dont.
I told her she had a bf and I still had bought her something. Then I was being bratty…jealous and selfish. I wanted to go to my room but they wanted me to see what the other kids unwrapped.
My grandmother called to say Merry Christmas. My mom told her I couldn’t talk because I was pouting because I didn’t get what i wanted.
I decided the perfime I bought my mom…I’d keep as a gift to myself. The cologne I got for her bf…went to my bf. I had used my neighborhood babysitting money.
Then it was time to go to the bf family…
My siblings got gifts and again…nothing for me. I hadn’t expected anything. I don’t know them.
My mom complained how I was in a b ad mood cause I didn’t get what I wanted…and to leave me alone.
I remember the boyfriends aunt coming and asking what I had wanted. I said anything. She must have asked me 5 times…you didn’t get one thing? Then she went and hollered at my mother and bf. She came back with $10 for me and told me to not b tell them. It was very sweet.
A year later…for Christmas I got boots and a purse. I ran and hugged my mom and fried that she had gotten me something. She said - i didn’t get you anything. Those are from “the aunt” she wanted you to have a gift to open. We told her not to.
Again - it was the sweetest thing ever. I called her right away to thank her.
I have kids now…and can’t imagine not having something for them. My mom could have made me something. Could have wrapped something of hers…something. Or could have done something nice for me. They could have at least warned me.
Ibviously, we don’t speak. This is just how she is…was. She would take us 4 kids for icecream…and buy everyone a cone except me. Ih…she’d gand me one and say feed this to your sister and hand me a spoon. Then sit a gobble a cone for her. If I complained she’d say she didn’t have enough money. If I was sick…no going to the doctor…she’d say jmy dad cut the insurance (which he didnt) He couldn’t under child support. When I graduated high school…she took everyone to dinner…my grandparents too. Before we left she and her now husband leaned over and said that if I wanted to go I could pay for my meal. I told them I hadn’t brought my purse. They said I could use the money from jmy grandparents in my card. I told them it was a check. They said they’d take that…just sign it over to them. I hugged my grandparents and told them I wouldn’t be going. Not why. My mom and the new husband informed them I didn’t want to spend time with them. I still never told. Just left.
Be grateful for what you have. 
I know exactly what you’re talking about. My Nana is one of those people who has everything - I gave her that Box of Nothing for Christmas one year when I was a kid.
I still have it, and it’s still full of stuff, belying the labels on the box
Here’s what it looks like:
https://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=At.D3eCbJT7YXxLcYg3HBhabvZx4?p=images+“Box+of+Nothing”&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-t-901&fp=1
One year we got my father a box and filled it with bubble wrap. He got to the center of the packing and found that there was nothing there. But he didn’t really get the Gift of Nothing – we actually were giving him the bubble wrap, which he loved to pop.
My mother withheld Christmas presents from me and my siblings or worse destroyed (in front of us) the gifts given to us by others more often than not throughout my childhood. I use to dream about killing her as a child.
I was a much-wanted, much-beloved child and my Christmases were always made special. Birthdays, too. I do realize how fortunate I was in that regard.
My husband was raised in foster homes, and birthdays and Christmases often weren’t celebrated at all - no cakes, no presents, no nice dinners. I made a point throughout our married life of going all out for such holidays in a modest attempt to balance out those bad years.
Both my boys are December babies - one 12/6 and one 12/10. I always made sure not to blend Christmas and birthdays. We never decorated for Christmas until after both birthdays had been celebrated. And we usually did something special in June for ‘half-birthday’ month, just because it was tough for little kids to wait an entire year between present-receiving events. The tradition stuck, though, and we still do a little something for half-birthday every year. This past June, I sent both boys gift certificates for a dinner out with their SOs.
Not as a child, but as a 20-something year old. One Christmas while living with a boyfriend I woke up to an empty stocking and no presents. Turns out he did buy me some presents - a large teddy bear and some gift cards. But he visited his mom on Christmas Eve and his brother was there with his niece - so he gave her the teddy bear. Then his mom’s boyfriend’s sons each bought him a gift that he wasn’t expecting - so he gave them the gift cards. Then his friend who was supposed to drive him to the mall (he had no vehicle at the time) to buy me stocking stuffers bailed on him. So there I was on Christmas morning watching him and his 5-year-old son open gifts, while I had absolutely nothing, and his son going “…daddy? Why didn’t Santa Claus bring Juicy anything?”
I did not receive any Christmas presents from age 11. My parents divorced when I was 11. My father gave her support money, which except for rent went for drugs and playing the horses. Most weeks there was very little food. She would buy cheap wrapping paper and wrap things we already had so it would look like I had gifts in case my Dad showed up to visit.
One year we had nothing under the tree for the kiddoes.
But.
That year, we gave them a choice.
A weekend at Busch Gardens Tampa or presents.
Easy choice, actually. 
We always got our new socks and undies and jammies wrapped and under the tree, and our stockings overfilled with nuts and hard candy. One year, that was all we got. No toys, or books, or - I think - even more clothes.
That was either the year they got divorced, or the year two or three relatives died.
My mother would always make the presents from my paternal grandmother disappear on our first day back to school. :mad: I don’t know if she threw them away, or gave them away, or what, but we would come home from school and the things she gave us wouldn’t be there any more, and she wouldn’t tell us what had happened to them.
No, my parents are not divorced.
She was also the type who said she didn’t want anything for Christmas, and then made a big scene when she did indeed get nothing for Christmas (and birthday too) but we found out the hard way that if she did get anything, she would say “I don’t want this junk!” and often destroy it in front of us. That was after we found out from talking to other kids that the whole “Mommies don’t get presents” thing wasn’t true.
I hope you didn’t stay with this guy much longer.
The Christmas after my parents divorced was rather slim. My mother was struggling mightily just to keep food on the table for 5 kids. We all found one gift each under the tree Christmas morning, we all received a pack of socks. Out grandmother had bought them and gave them to our mother so we had something. Our father’s gift to us was making a house payment for my mother, it was all of $60. He did this instead of paying the $180 a month in child support he never paid.
Or, there is this take (from Buffy, of course):
Dawn: Umm, guys, hello? Puberty? Sort of figured out the whole “no Santa” thing.
Anya: That’s a myth.
Dawn: Yeah.
Anya: No, I mean it’s a myth that it’s a myth. There is a Santa Claus.
Xander: The advantage of having a thousand year old girlfriend. Inside scoop.
Tara: There’s a Santa Claus?
Anya: Mm-hmm. Been around since like the 1500’s, but he wasn’t always called Santa… but you know, Christmas night, flying, coming down the chimney, all true.
Dawn: All true?
Anya: Well he doesn’t traditionally bring presents so much as you know, disembowel children, but otherwise…
Tara: The reindeer part was nice.