Actually, KSO, around here they’ve been out since LABOR DAY.
Miss Davis, I wish I knew. This year, we’re staying home for Thanksgiving, and I told my mother that we won’t be staying over at her place on Christmas eve (we just got married in June, so this is my husband’s and my first Christmas “as a family”).
She called me up last night and got all hysterical and weepy about it (“I can’t stand to be ALL ALONE on Christmas morning!!” What, don’t you have any friends? You keep telling me about all your friends.) about it, then hung up on me when I didn’t back down. < insert startled smiley here >
One of the reasons we’re not staying there (I mean, besides the fact that she’s being a manipulative bitch :o ) is that she SMOKES like a fiend, and the whole place REEKS of cigarette smoke. I used to smoke, and I can’t stand to spend time there, because it makes me want a cigarette SO BAD. Also, after a few hours in that house, I can’t breathe (that’s why I quit in the first place). My husband has been having asthma problems, so he can’t breathe there either.
I finally sent her an e-mail last night telling her this, after she hung up on me. I didn’t dare check my personal account this morning, and I can’t access it from work, so I don’t know what kind of response I got. However, every time I’ve asked her not to smoke around me, she has accused me of being a “self-righteous ex-smoker” and lit up. I once almost threw her out of my car in a bad neighborhood for trying to light up a few months after I quit.
Well, that was quite a rant! I feel better now. 
I guess the only suggestion I have is to tell them you’re not coming, and don’t back down.
Never attribute to malice anything that can be attributed to stupidity.
– Unknown
Breaks my heart. Everyone else will be arguing and backstabbing each other and I’ll be making holograms! So far we’ve made holograms of a plastic monkey, a model car, and . . . Pikachu. 