I like Christmas ornaments - pretty specific Christmas ornaments - which can be bought off the sale table for the past two weeks for around $15. I find nothing wrong with getting a $15 peice of costume jewelry - if someone has taken the time to pick something that matches my taste and usual color scheme. I enjoy books - pick up the hardback Carl Hiassen novel (which I’d never buy for myself in hardback!) for $25 and I’d really like it
For my kids - my son likes Bionicles - $10. He likes Magic cards - a booster is what, $9? My daughter is perfectly happy with $10 worth of My Littlest Pet Shop or Polly Pockets.
We got this a few years ago from my sister and her husband (or one like it) - best present we’ve gotten in years - $10:
For my family - we often buy my brother in law a bottle of wine - we don’t go to the cheap “under $10” end of wine - its more in the $30 bottle range. My mother is happiest with photos of the kids. My sister gets something she needs - in the $30 range - she’s usually pretty specific (this year it was “cake decorating stuff”) My father like action movies - there’s $20.
A while ago my family looked around. We are all frankly pretty well off and could afford to really spend a lot on Christmas. But we are as happy with these sorts of gifts as we are with the expensive stuff - and the deal with the expensive stuff is that we all have pretty specific taste. I can buy a $200 sweater for my husband and get something he will wear - its hard for my mother to do that for my husband. I’d rather spend $20 on my family members (and have them spend $20 on me) and take all the rest of that money and buy what I really want that fits my taste - and I’d rather they do the same. For us, its not how much you spend, but that there is this event, where everyone unwraps presents.
(My parents do buy SEVERAL things for everyone - and usually one larger gift for each of their daughters).
Aren’t her brother’s grownup as well? Part of being a grownup with a family that your fully capable of supporting is not allowing your elderly parents to go practically in debt by buying gifts that you could buy yourself. Or at least have some degree of social etiquette to acknowledge the fact that their sister is buying gifts for four kids by a small token gift or card.
I’d be very uncomfortable if my parents bought gifts for my children that I was capable of buying myself at the exclusion of my sister with limited means and is pretty much alone.
If something feels wrong, it usually is wrong.
I don’t want to read too much into this but in the first post Aunt Flow mentioned something about them coming back into their parents life. Could this be why they’re being so extravagant?
Every family is different. Some families hardly exchange gifts. This seems like such a departure from the way things have always been that that’s why it’s bothering Aunt Flow.
Well of course it’s negotiable. If it’s obligatory, it’s not a gift. And of course there’s a scale of worthiness, which is determined by the giver. Of course, *I’m not arguing that *Aunt Flow ** isn’t worthy of a gift. If that’s all you’re getting out of this, then I really don’t know what else to say.
I wasn’t insulting Aunt Flow. I’m simply stating that she’s an adult, being treated like one of the adults. IMO, it’s far more insulting to say she should be treated like a child.
And of couse children should be taught to give gifts. In my opinon, a child should have a small gift for everyone who gives them one. But the issue here isn’t whether **Aunt Flow’s ** nieces and nephews should give her gifts, it’s whether her *parents * should. And if her parents aren’t giving gifts to any of their other children, then I don’t understand why she should expect one.
Absolutely nothing. Except that no one is asking whether it’s okay to give **Aunt Flow ** gifts. Of course it is! The discussion is about whether she has a right to **expect ** them.
Then no one should ever give gifts except to their own children, since everyone else is either a self-reliant adult or should be in the care of a self-reliant parent. Yet you want gifts for your child despite the fact that you are a grown-up and therefore should be self-reliant and provide an acceptable Christmas for your own kid.
It seems that some people think that gifts are finite. They aren’t.
Single and/or childless people do get treated differently; the goal is to not treat them worse. You could argue that her sibliings are getting all the gifts, because they are going to their families, and as we have established here, parents get joy out of their children’s joy. I doubt her brothers will even notice much that their parents haven’t given them a gift, because they will be sharing the joy of their children’s gifts, and they will have their own family Christmas with gifts from their SO and (presumably) children, and possibly they wouldn’t mind at all if Aunt Flow got a gift that they didn’t (that would be mature).
I don’t really like the idea of treating one adult child differently than the other, but in this situation, I think it would be warranted. This is a case where treating all the sibs the same has more serious results for one than the others. I don’t have kids, but it seems like you can’t treat all kids the same all the time. There has to be some consideration for circumstances.
You have already said that Christmas is for kids, and that gifts are for kids.
She has a right to expect to be treated kindly and generously by people who claim to love her. Her parents have made it very clear that gift-giving is important, so important that they will fund her gift-giving, so long as it’s for gifts for their grandchildren. That is a clear statement that gifts are an important symbol for these people, and the OP doesn’t merit them.
featherlou, I guess my feeling is that it’s up to Aunt Flow’s parents to decide whom they want to give gifts to. And while I think it would be great if they gave her something, I can also see why they wouldn’t want to treat her differently than her siblings.
anaamika, I don’t think of not receiving a gift as being “left out of the celebration”, for reasons I mentioned earlier. Also, speaking for myself, I would feel much more awkward as the only adult opening gifts than I would simply not getting any.
What I’m getting is that you think that gift giving is something the giver has to think about, and say, “I want to give a gift to this person who is related to me and will be at my house for Christmas, but not to that person who is also related and will also be at my house.” It seems that you think it’s okay for givers to discriminate. In my book, love does not discriminate.
You seemed to say that she was acting like a child when you said “incapable of taking joy in the happiness of others, and only appeased by shiny things.” Yeah, I know technically you said that’s what I seem to think. But you have called her immature. And I don’t think she is.
I was talking about you, and your bizarre (to me) belief that your daughter should get all the presents and you get none. I just happen to think that that’s a great way to teach entitlement.
If you read the OP, you’ll see that she’s not asking if she should expect them. She’s asking if she’s right to feel hurt. And I think she is.
On preview: When I was a child, many times I felt awkward being the only person opening gifts. See how that works?
Yes, of course. I’m single, unmarried, no children. When something really horrible happens I come home to my dog. He’s swell, but not a great talker. I phone my dad and talk to him. Yes, I suppose that means that I’m not fully independent. I suppose that means that I actually need and want to have another person who is interested in my welfare just because. Personally, I don’t think that makes me a bad person, or a crap adult, or anything else. Additionally, I don’t think the fact that my dad talks to me on the phone takes anything, at all away from my niece and nephew.
It’s swell that you live in a universe where when people turn 18 they suddenly don’t require any support from their familys anymore. I do not, and I submit that Aunt Flow doesn’t either. Furthermore, suggesting that wanting to maintain a relationship with your parents is immature makes you sound like a Fem-Bot of some sort.
DianaG, Aunt Flow has confessed that she’s barely scraping by, that she has no SO, and that she has not made friends yet. This thread is not about materialism or the allure of “shiny” things. It’s about someone feeling invisible.
Wow. That’s just obtuse. My remark about self-reliance, was that it (as opposed to marriage or childbearing) is the mark of adulthood, in that when we have achieved it, we have earned the right to be treated like adults, which is desirable. Most of us *prefer * to not be treated like children. Although apparently some of us expect to be treated like whichever suits us at any particular moment.
Being an adult doesn’t mean you don’t maintain relationships, it means that those relationships are equal and reciprocal.
Seriously, what exactly is difficult to understand here? Aunt Flow’s parents have decided, rightly or wrongly, not to buy gifts for their adult offspring. Aunt Flow, being one of said offspring, will not receive a gift. She is being treated exactly the same as her siblings.
We can certainly debate about whether they should buy gifts for all of their adult children. But I really don’t see what’s debatable about whether they should buy gifts for only *one * of their children, simply because she has no kids of her own.
DianaG, if you’re in a group of people, and all of them are opening gifts - EVERYBODY has one, except for one person, you don’t think that person is justified in feeling a little bit hurt?
She probably wouldn’t be the only one opening gifts though. Her siblings and parents will probalby recieve gifts from their spouses, and it’s likely they have friends in the area that they’ll be exchanging gifts with.
I don’t think it’s about them treating her and her siblings equally or not, it’s that this, combined with everything else, is making it a sucky situation. Gift giving and opening gifts on Christmas morning, regardless of what you think about it, is part of the holidays for many families in our culture, so yes she is being left out of part of the celebration. And it’s going to be awkward among her family when they realise that she didn’t get anything at all.
But are all of these people going to be in the same place opening gifts at the same time? Perhaps so, I may well have missed that part. But I’m assuming that her siblings and their spouses would open their gifts from each other or from their friends at their own homes.
“Exactly the same” does not always equal “best all around”. What is so difficult to understand about that? Because her parents are treating her exactly the same as her siblings, she gets less at Christmas than her siblings. That’s not the best all around.
Just out of curiosity, do you only have the one kid? If so, perhaps you lack a certain perspective on this.