Share your lamest, most disappointing holiday memories

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

I feel your pain. Mine wasn’t braces though. You see, my sister and I, 7ish and 6 respectively, had both decided it was riotously funny to sneak up on each other with the intent of scaring the bejeezus out of each other. So for several days we’d been hiding in closets, behind couches, and around the corners to jump out -BOO- and make the other scream. Then our parents got really mad at all the screaming and told us to knock it off.

Easter morning, I woke up at the crack of stupid. It was still dark outside, but the clock said it was technically “morning”, therefore, chocolate bunny time!

Bleary eyed, I padded down the hall, my feet silent in footy pajamas. When suddenly, I heard my prey in the kitchen. O-ho! She was up too - in a darkened house no less - trying to get an unfair early start ahead of me at the chocolate egg loot!

As I heard her rummaging around the kitchen, I took a strategic position at the bottom of the stairs, just around the corner of the kitchen entry-way. I crouched down for maximum jack-in-the-box effect, and as soon as I saw a sliver of flannel robe I pounced with a “RAAARH!” to wake the dead.

Did I mention that my uncle was visiting? You see, he doesn’t sleep well in strange places, so he got up really early…

I nearly gave him a heart attack and he responded instinctively. The back of his fist connected with my forehead. I flew backwards, tripped on the bottom stair, turned to try to catch myself, and hit the side of my jaw on the railing. Stars!

When I came to, all the lights were on, my loose tooth was on the floor, and the big chewing muscle at the hinge of my jaw had swollen up like the Easter Bunny had shoved an egg into the side of my face. My uncle and both parents were looking at me: concern, concern, barely disguised rage. I thought my dad was going to kill me.

By the time we’d found all the eggs, my face had stiffened up so bad that I could barely get my teeth apart wide enough for a straw, let alone a fork of food. So I couldn’t actually eat any of my chocolate eggs or solid bunnies. The hollow ones I could break and slide into the gap, then melt in my mouth, but my parents would let me have them as punishment for my short reign of chaos.

No Easter dinner for me. I could only eat soup, mashed potatoes, and jello, that I could suck through the very tender gap left by my fallen tooth.

No sympathy for me either.

62

ALL of these stories break my heart.

(I do like Halloween and maybe Easter.) We here celebrate Cinco de Mayo, Midsummer’s Eve, the first day of the seasons, and Valentine’s Day by making appropriate meals and desserts. (Cherry pie for Washington’s Birthday!) The rest of the holidays just plain suck. All that enforced jolly celebration with people you don’t even want to see, and that includes The Big Labor Day Cookout Block Party. It was one thing when people lived in small villages years ago with nothing else to brighten up their drab lives. If your friends and family have bugged out for jobs down south, if something horrendous happens to you on a holiday, what fun is it to carry on The Tradition? It’s all spend spend spend. Decorate! Frolic! (I think Festivus should be made an official holiday.)

63

Antigen, in order to be fair, if you are going to have a party you have to invite the whole Straight Dope, all three thousand of us. Be sure to wear your purple party dress!

64

I went with my in-laws to an Indian buffet the night before the first Passover seder. I started feeling a bit off in the car on the way home, but I figured it was just a touch of carsickness. At 5 AM, I woke up feeling like I was going to vomit. I spent the whole day in the bedroom (which fortunately had an attached bathroom). I couldn’t even keep water down until that evening.

Most of the family was busy getting ready for the seder, so I was pretty much left alone all day. With one notable exception. Mr. Neville’s uncle by marriage, who is a doctor, came in and said to me, “You know, 9000 Americans a year die from this”. I don’t know if that’s true. But it is not what I needed to hear at that moment. I wish I could have thrown up on him, but I didn’t.

I missed the seder, but at least I started feeling better around evening. I hurt for a few days after that- I had vomited hard enough that I pulled some stomach muscles.

We never went back to that Indian buffet. It’s gone out of business now, or so my in-laws tell me.

65

Oh gosh, I am obsessed with this topic, I know, but I have one more, again, Thanksgiving. Early 70’s. I was flying from Florida vacation to NY to visit the relatives. I was about 17 and had just been fitted for hard contact lenses and went through the tortures of the damned trying to live with the agony of getting used to them. Between falling asleep with the lenses on my eyeballs and the dry air on the plane, the lenses glued themselves to my corneas. My uncle had to go out and find a drugstore open at 10 p.m. the night before Thanksgiving to buy some contact lens solution. I squirted a half bottle in each eye and finally got the fuckers out. Couldn’t see a thing, everything was white and cloudy, I thought I was for all intents and purposes blind for life. And still hurting. They had to lead me around by the hand, even walk me into the bathroom and tell me when it was ok to sit down on the toilet. I spent the evening lying, blind, crying, on a strange bed. My vision came back, slowly. Just in time for Thanksgiving, which this time,oddly enough, I had something to be grateful for.

66

I have nothing to match some of the truly awful events some of you have posted here. Please indulge my lame story.

My sister, I found out later, held a grudge against me and my wife for years over our failure to send thank-you notes for her nice presents to our son. My bad, Mrs. H’s family is a little dysfunctional in this area, and I didn’t check to make sure the notes went out.

The actual experience we had was that my sister never said anything, but always had an excuse to not get together at Thanksgiving or Christmas. But instead of merely absenting herself, she made sure that Mom and Dad spent the holiday with herself and her husband. I had no idea she was upset with me, I thought that she was possibly depressed over the death of our beloved aunt.

After a couple of years of this, we just gave up and started inviting friends over. Then one year, Mom and Dad accepted our invitation to Thanksgiving. I didn’t feel right in dis-inviting our friends, so we had a house full on the day.

I had to be in the kitchen to cook and could not devote time to settling everyone in. Coming back into the living room I was treated to the spectacle of my Dad stating to my friends, who lived in nearby Madison, that he would like to see someone drop a nuclear bomb on their town.

To their credit, my friends were amused by Dad’s antagonism. Of course, that only made him more furious. I never did find out what the problem was, but knowing Dad, he probably was offended that everyone didn’t share his strong conservative convictions. He and his brother used to spend every holiday working themselves up into a tizzy over the terrible turn toward socialism that the USA has taken ever since Roosevelt took office.

Actually, my uncle was worse than Dad. One Christmas Eve, he went on at length about how young people today just want everything handed to them. He turned to my sister and ordered her to go get him a drink. I pointed out to him that he was, in fact, asking to be waited on. He became enraged and started choking me. Fortunately there were family members present to pull him off or I would have been forced to hurt him.

For me, it’s come to the point where it’s more of a relief that we don’t see much of our families any more. My wife has been almost completely cut off from her mother and sister apparently because she doesn’t share their conservative religious and political convictions.

It’s truly lame that we’ve lost connection with our families over things that, in the end, are fairly trivial. But if you live your life filled with hate for people who don’t think like you, it leaks out into every thing you do. I love my family but I don’t like them much.

Walt

67

This is why god invented weed and Canada legalized it.

Didn’t you have the net at the time? Always good TV to find online.

68

My birthday is January 9th. Every year my birthday would be a little bleak because since my dad worked seasonally and they had already spent all their money on Christmas. My mom would be distant and depressed and my dad basically checked out of our lives in any meaningful way. The year I was turning 10 was especially bad, my dad hadn’t worked in months and my parents had spent way too much on Christmas gifts (a perennial problem with them) So that night for dinner we had corn chowder made from a long forgotten can of corn and some evaporated milk and my gift was a 10$ tape player.

Now it’s not so much how little was spent because even as a child I wasn’t concerned with labels and big gifts. It was that year after year my parents put so little forethought in preparing for my birthday. It’s not like it ever changed days. All they would have had to do was buy me one less gift for Christmas and put aside 20$ for a pizza so I could have at least ONE friend over to celebrate.

I still hate my birthday and I never make a big deal out of it. In the last few years my father has switched jobs and they have more money so they’ve tried in their own way to make it up to me. But buying me expensive gifts can’t take away the memories of crying in my bed at night wondering why I had such bad luck as to be born two weeks after Christmas. Why I always felt less important than my brother and sister who always had happy birthdays with balloons and cakes.
The worst part of it is my daughter was born January 16th. And my husband is the sort of person who loves to give gifts. I have to fight my impulse to want to avoid buying Christmas gifts and realize that my experiences aren’t automatically going to be her experiences.

69

This is a mixed bag of several years…
My paternal grandfather, Abuelito Ignacio, died on January 4th, which happened to be his daughter’s birthday. That side of my family got Christmas presents on January 6th, which is the traditional day in Spain (it’s the feast of the Epiphany and the main reading is about the Magi coming to see the Newborn King). We would get them at home, then we’d go to Abuelita’s house to get presents from her and from other sides of the family (each from his godparents, there might also be something from Uncle JM the merchant navy captain if he happened to be in town); eventually, us kids grew up beyond that, but it was decided that it was still important to have at least one day in the year when we would all see each other; it was also decreed that we’d all get together in a restaurant as that was the easiest thing to organize. The important feastdays were off, as restaurants would be either closed or fully reserved months in advance, so January 4th was picked.
The first year were celebrating it like this, someone mentioned what a bummer it must have been for Auntie when her Dad died on her birthday, and she said “well, it wasn’t my idea of a present, but it’s not like he went and did it on purpose and we’d known he was sick for quite a while.” Abuelita piped up “oh, absolutely, doing it on purpose (if he’d been able to) would have been so impolite! And if there is one thing your father was not, it would be impolite.”

Years later, I moved to the US for graduate school. Abuelita had recently moved into an Old Folks’ Home, as she did not feel comfortable living on her own any more, although she still had her house and would spend a few hours there almost every day. As I was leaving, she told me “ay, I don’t know if I will see you again!” and I said “you will. I am coming back for Christmas, and we *will *see each other then.” I knew that like I knew that the sun makes things hot.
Next Christmas I did, indeed, come home. During the meal, she constantly mistook Littlebro for another one of the cousins who were born in the same year (they have similar coloring); she kept asking the same questions. I gave her a hug that tried to pull together every hug we’d ever given each other. I knew, like I knew that the sun makes things hot, that I was not going to see her again.

She died the following Feast of the Annunciation, March 25th, which was a saturday.

A very different one: December 3rd is a “national” holiday for my region; “national holiday” not in the American sense, but in the same way that St Andrew’s is a Scottish holiday or St Patrick’s an Irish one. It’s the feastday of our patron saint (who happens to be a local boy, too), it’s a celebration of our history as a nation, and I really hate having to work on that particular day.

Two years ago, I had a boss who was from the next province over and a total holy-water-drinker; her religious culture left a lot to be desired but she spent a lot of time trying to pull holier-than-thou on the rest of the team, and being pushed off her high horse with cites from the official Catechism of the Catholic Church. During the hiring interview (April) I had mentioned that, me being a Navarrese corporation, December 3rd is a holiday for me, my Government says so. I had put it in the list whenever we were told to ask for vacation days.
On december 2nd, the bitch finally tells me she’s denying it. She claims I’ve never said anything (I only had emails going back 8 months), she claims I’m needed at meetings (I specifically had made sure not to have any for the 3rd), she goes into “how can you do this to me” mode (me? I am doing it to her?)…
I usually wake up about 5am. On the 3rd, I woke up at 8am (which was the time at which I should have been at work); I had to leave work about 10am with a bad attack of not-officially-MS-but-it’s-similar. Trembling hands, trembling legs, vertigo, the mere idea of eating was repulsive as well as too much effort… it’s stress-triggered, and I still kind of hope the needs-to-get-laid-bitch dies a virgin.

70

We haven’t, unfortunately.

71

I know. But close enough. Seriously, the next step is Amsterdam for you guys.

72

The boy in Winnipeg that I like was born in late December (“Those of us who have birthdays in winter know what the Three Wise Men said to Jesus: ‘Now, this is both for your birthday and Christmas.’” - Bob Smith) and in addition he had a really screwed up childhood, so his parents never even tried with the birthday parties.

This past year he happened to be in town in June and I decreed that he would have an Unbirthday Party – his first birthday party (or reasonable facsimile thereof) in 26 years. I invited all of our friends and we had tea and pineapple upside-down cake (what else do you serve at an unbirthday beside upside-down cake?) He enjoyed himself.

73

Also: my dad started acting strange on my mom’s birthday; they went to the hospital, and he died of brain cancer on their 24th wedding anniversary. (They say that terminally ill people have a certain amount of control on exactly when they die, and they sometimes “hold out” for significant dates.)

74

This is totally lame compared to other stories, but on my 22 birthday, my “designated driver” apparently got confused about the concept and got paralytically drunk. Another friend insisted that she hold my wallet, because “I was going to lose it”, and promptly lost it herself. So I lost all my birthday money, and had to call another friend’s boyfriend to drive us home, and spent the rest of the night taking care of the DD. Fun!

75

I’m sorry you got attacked, but if I was there instead of you, and wasn’t too busy pissing myself laughing, I’d have pointed that out, too.

76

Ouch. You’ve reminded me of the year I got my braces “adjusted” (read “tightened, apparently with a pneumatic wrench, seemingly wielded by a drunken monkey”) the day before Thanksgiving. I think my festive meal consisted of applesauce, mashed potatoes, and cranberry jelly, supplemented by the couple of bites of turkey that I gamely tried to chew before the pain overwhelmed the pleasure of eating.

Did I mention that I (naively) thought that Orajel (topical benzocaine used to relieve the discomfort of teething and canker sores) would help with the deep, bone-grinding pain associated with having one’s teeth winched into position? It doesn’t do a damn thing, of course, except numb one’s tongue and make everything taste like artificial cherry flavoring and cheap wine.

Still better than that rainy Thanksgiving with the ex.

77

It says something about my ability to block out unhappy memories that when I opened this thread, I thought “Hrm, I don’t really have any of these,” and then as I read on I remembered that I have a HOLY SHIT-TON.

As a child, between my single mom going through medical school starting at age 7, and some poorly-timed bad illnesses, I don’t think I went trick-or-treating until I was about 13. This explains why I went trick-or-treating up until my senior year of high school.

In college, I missed a New Year’s party due to severe illness, and in law school I missed an awesome Christmas party where all my friends rented a castle-thingy in Maryland and flew in from all over the country because I had strep throat.

And then as an adult, my husband ruined not one, but two Christmas parties. The first was the first Christmas party held by the fledgling start-up business he co-owns. All six original partners and their spouses got a limo and went out to Buca di Beppo for dinner. There was much drinking, but what got my poor husband was a medication interaction. Nowhere on the bottle was there a sticker saying “Don’t drink while taking this,” but it’s the first thing you see when you google the med. Nothing like vomiting in the middle of a restaurant and having to take a cab to the hospital after he refused an ambulance transport with his last cognizant moment to ruin a party, and then we had to cancel the party we were throwing the next day because he was still feeling the effects, several IVs and some dose of something or other later.

But the worst has got to be last Christmas, our daughter’s first. We were both so excited. And then my husband wakes up at 5:00 AM vomiting. He staggers back into bed, burning up with fever. My daughter woke up not quite two hours later, and he literally could not get out of bed at all. I took her downstairs to let him sleep, and found that during the night, our cats had knocked over the Christmas tree, breaking several ornaments and spilling the water from the base all over the presents. I couldn’t get it back into place, so I propped it up against the wall and took the presents into the adjacent room to dry. My in-laws got there at 8:30, and somehow I managed to get the cinnamon rolls into the oven, but we ended up opening sopping wet presents without my husband, after which point my in-laws took pity on me and took the baby for the day so I could clean up the mess and take care of him. They came back at 6:30 that night, long enough for him to come downstairs and doze in his chair in between opening his presents from them. I am pretty sure that to this day, he doesn’t really remember anything from last Christmas at all.

78

Another Thanksgiving memory! No wonder I loathe that day above all others! Several years ago, my husband and daughter both had rip-roaring colds and of COURSE we were all expected at my mother’s for the Big Thanksgiving Day Feast. My dad was very ill (cancer) and we didn’t want him to be exposed to those germs, so I left the two of them at home and went to my mother’s by myself. And a very glum time was had by all…but it was THANKSGIVING!. (While I was there, my husband called and confessed that he and our girl, about age 10, got antsy and went out for a walk to get some air. It was 40 degrees and raining, there was also a foot of snow on the ground, and both of them sick, but they bundled up and went out anyway. Went down to the marsh for a hike on the trail, and my daughter slid on a slippery patch on a wooden bridge and fell into waist deep water.)

:smack::smack::smack:

79

salinqmind, you’re right…the majority of these tales are breaking my heart. This one, however, cracked me the hell up. Sorry, SMC…

I remembered another lame one to add a bit of levity here:

Halloween sometime in the early '80s (anyone else seeing a pattern here?)…
I was a most dedicated Halloweener, composed mad authentic costumes, stayed in character all night long, scheduled multiple parties to attend & hopefully win admiration and prizes everywhere.

This particular Halloween was no exception, had a big long list of fabulous parties to attend and WOW everyone with my spectacular home-made saloon girl outfit.
The problem was that I was just a little bit fatigued from the night before, which I had spent partying like a…well, like a 22 year old, imbibing and indulging in every available substance and liquid within reach.

So, in the process of preparing for the next round of awesome partying, whilst carefully pulling on my fishnet tights and my frilly under-drawers, I sat down on the bed and just laid back for a minute to rest my head…

/harp strums/

…and woke up at around 4am, bedroom lights ablaze, with my tights halfway pulled up. Realized I’d slept through my favorite holiday and all the fun.
Boo hoo hoo. :frowning:

80

New Year’s Eve, 1991, my freshman year. My sister is performing in the Cotton Bowl parade, so I’m dragged down to Dallas with my parents so we can watch her. We have to get up at the buttcrack of dawn on New Year’s day, so my parents insist on going to bed crazy early. I rang in the New Year alone in a darkened hotel room, listening to the sound of fireworks outside between the roars of my parents’ snores. Not that bad, right? But what made it so horrible was that I knew my best girl friends were at home at that very moment, having our first serious boy-girl party, and the guy I was majorly crushing on was there. I was 14 and shallow–I thought it was a tragedy and gave my parents grief over it for a ridiculously long time.

My 19th birthday–my 15 year-old cousin died a few days before, the funeral was the day after. I didn’t even remember it *was *my birthday until somebody said something to me about it late that morning.

New Year’s Eve, 1999. I remember thinking about that night through my teen years, and how great it was going to be…I’d be in my twenties, just the right age to have the biggest celebration EVAH! Yeah. Turned out I went to a small house party with a guy I knew was cheating on me, but I hadn’t worked up enough self-esteem to dump yet. And then the party broke up early because some tool pulled a gun when another guy accidently spilled a drink on him. Whoo hoo. This one does have a bright side, though, because I dumped the jerk the next morning. And best yet, that was the night my husband and I really connected. We had met before, but that night we spent a while chatting, and that’s what set our relationship off. So good and bad came out of the night, but I still count it as a disappointment because I had built it up in my mind for so many years.

Thanksgiving 2006. Had an early miscarriage a few days before, but it was taking its time “finishing,” so my doctor had me come in for a D&C on Wednesday so I wouldn’t have to worry about it over the holiday weekend (or more likely, I’m sure, so *she *wouldn’t be bothered with it.) To top things off, that evening I start feeling ill, and it turns into the full-blown flu. We had planned to drive about four hours to spend the holiday with some of my husband’s family but I was too sick/upset to go. What a miserable week, but at least I had my hubby and my kitties there to comfort me. And in a complete turnaround, almost exactly one year later, my beautiful daughter was born on the Monday before Thanksgiving.