Just wanted a place to tell stories of " I love these people, but I’m glad it’s only once a year! "
Here’s mine:
My sister is recently sober. Because she wants to see if it will help her lose weight. So she can’t have rum cake or anything cooked with alcohol. That’s cool with me. No judgement there (well, yeah, a little)
She found my vaporizer and drilled me about how I could be so lucid while smoking hash. It’s my try to quit smoking vape. just for smoking nicotine. But she really wanted to try it if I could convince her that it never had any hash in it. So I did. And then I felt like “what the fuck?!? That’s not my hash pipe and I’d rather you laid off it anyway”
Christmas makes me silly. Love my sister but I really should have said not yours not your business.
Our tradition is to have everyone - my wife’s parents, her three kids and all the grandkids - over to the house for Christmas brunch and then opening presents.
Gripe #1 - we now have to choose between older stepdaughter and her family, or younger stepdaughter and her kids, because of family issues where we can no longer have them at the same family get-together. So it sucks not being able to have the whole family together.
Gripe #2 - this year it was old stepdaughter’s family’s turn for Christmas with us. They are the vegans, so we have to have a whole alternate menu for them to eat (no meat, nothing made with eggs or cheese).
Gripe #3 - since older stepdaughter was planning on coming over for Christmas brunch, she wanted to open presents with her family on Christmas eve instead of waiting until Christmas morning. However, her husband vetoed that plan and insisted that they open presents on Christmas morning. Husband then decides on Christmas that he wants to sleep all morning, so we’re forced to either wait for them to get here or start brunch without them. (We ate without them.)
Gripe #4: Everyone comes over to eat, but nobody ever offers to bring anything or help clean up afterwards, so we’re up early busting our ass to get food ready. No sleeping till noon for us! After brunch is over, we open presents, then everyone clears out, leaving my wife and I to clean up the mess after they’re gone. (My wife’s parents are excused from this part of the gripe, since they are in their 80’s and I don’t expect them to do a lot of cooking or cleaning up.)
Every frickin’ holiday is like this. I love my family but this crap is getting old.
As the mother in the house where people gather, I increasingly feel that my holidays are spent sorting out everyone’s conflicting desires, to the detriment of my own.
Oh well. We’re contemplating a cross-country move next year. That would solve THAT problem.
As a single person whose friends are scattered, I don’t often have much choice for garnering some Christmas cheer. But going to my brother’s means putting up with the inane chatter of his ex-wife’s mother’s shallow friends wondering why I’m single (so’s their son) and telling me they miss my mom (who couldn’t stand them).
We all put up with this more-or-less for my nieces’ sake, but they are both in college now. Maybe next year I will have a good excuse for not attending.
Every year I have to listen to litany (and why is it always a ‘litany’?) of everyone else’s problems, how hard life is for them, and how unfair. I have been told how lucky I am for things like not having a crippling mortgage, not being upside down on the house, and for not having to pay back excessive loans for expensive private colleges.
I manage to not share the very real problems I am having (well, unless I can turn them into a good story, because that is what family is all about, good stories), because they are no-one else’s burden or business. But I swear this is the last year I will bite my tongue to keep from snarling, "It wasn’t ALL luck; some of it is due to better decisions that you made.)
When I joined my brother for grocery shopping while visiting for the holidays, I purchased a big bag of dark russet potato chips - it seemed to be a good choice for a side dish to our leftover cold ham and macaroni salad lunch.
I am not personally attached to this food item. There is no need to continually refer to them as Ann’s potato chips. …for three days it was “Ann’s potato chips are pretty yummy” … “Let’s have some more of Ann’s potato chips”.
And no, I’m not going to take half of MY large bag of chips back to New York with me so stop reminding me not to forget them. Why, you asked? Because opened bags of chips do not travel well and I have no use for a half bag of potato chip dust. No I do not want you to rummage around to find a box for me to pack them in. Really, don’t . Just keep the freaking chips and co-mingle them with the rest of your snack food collection. If I want dark russet chips in New York I will purchase a bag at the grocery. Enough already with the obsession over “my” potato chips. Merry Freakin’ Christmas consider them my gift to you.
My mother is 90 and living in a nice care home where her mental status and physical condition has improved 200% in the past year. Her doctor, my family, and even the social worker I consulted told me it’s better to leave her there than move her.
I call her every day. But her conversations are all gripes. Not so much about the care home, but interactions with the other residents, her great nieces and nephews making noise on Christmas day, how her doctors talk to her, and how the church choir director doesn’t give her solos. You get the idea.
Just one day a month I need to not talk to her on the phone.
No, you don’t.
Invite ALL your family – if some of them refuse to come, that’s their decision. Tell them you will all miss them.
Why are you as parents catering to their childish squabbles?
Again, your own fault.
Why do you say “offers to bring”? You’re the parent, you TELL them what they should bring. Tell 'em you’re doing the meal, but assign one of them to do pre-dinner appetizers, and another to do dessert.
Cleanup is equally easy – after dinner, start assigning tasks to everyone. Or enlist the grandchildren in this – announce that the kids are to clear the table and bring everything into the kitchen, then the adults will wash & wipe the dishes and put everything away. Keep smiling all the time, but keep insisting.
Otherwise, quit complaining about what you allow to happen.
Go for it. Some people just don’t get that we’re all living different lives, making different choices, and having different struggles.
Exactly. My brother-in-law decided about six years ago that he was going to cut us out of his life, and our response to everyone in the family trying to decide who to invite to family things (us or them) was, “Do exactly what you want. We don’t care if he is there or not - don’t make this a problem for yourselves.”
My husband’s family - I’m pretty sure I’ve bitched about this before. Every Christmas, their big family gathering is hosted at his aunt and uncle’s house. That would be fine, except they’re smokers, and they cannot possibly not smoke in the house for SIX FUCKING HOURS while they host a whole bunch of non-smokers. This year was a double whammy - all the smokers showed up, so the smoke stench was heavy in the house, and this year they decided to up the ante by smoking weed as well. I don’t care much about the legality of weed, but don’t force it on your guests, you assholes. Maybe some of us don’t want to breathe in poison all night, of the cigarette or marijuana variety.
We’re thinking about drastically changing our Christmas plans for the future - go away someplace warm at Christmas, and spend time with my husband’s immediate family only before or after Christmas. If I never went to the smoke house at Christmas again, I would love it.
I used to go back to the States and visit my sister and her family for Christmas. BIL is a Fox-news watching, Southern Baptist who is still fighting the War of Aggression of Those Evil Northern States (or whatever they call it these days), who naturally hates liberals, atheist and Democrats.
Apparently, his conversations material 365 days a year consists of rants concerning these groups, blacks and gays. You can image how well we got along.
One of the last [del]conversations we had[/del] times I listen to his crazy rants was how America is going downhill because whites aren’t having enough kids. I walked out of the room and that was the last trip there.