The Vine: August 10, 2011 Special Edition
16 August update
Happy Elvis deathiversary, everyone. These tales have been great, hilarious, and super-helpful. I’d like to hear even MORE stories from you guys, specifically about any issues you may have had around the following:
- when you started dating, like, in November: how do you straddle the line between showing you care but not showing you care TOO much
- handling different religious backgrounds and traditions at the holidays (or creating new ones)
- handling different OCD ideas about opening gifts on Eve vs. Day; when to trim the tree; how and in what order gifts are opened; etc.
- when you thought it was time to meet the fam, but he just…went home and didn’t mention it
- income disparity in a couple and how that’s handled gift-wise (or not)
- singleness at the holidays: do you like it? hate it? not care either way? feel relieved you don’t have to go to someone’s super-crowded home for five days and sleep in a twin bed?
- New Year’s: do you assume you’ll spend it together? has New Year’s (or the kissing at midnight) ever prompted the ruination of a relationship?
- more holiday breakups and hookups
- expecting a proposal on Christmas and not getting it; not expecting one, and getting one you didn’t want
Thank you so much for all the stories so far; keep those cards and letters coming!
Hello, friends! In lieu of a customary Vine today, I’m asking for your stories about holiday relationship “challenges.” I would love to hear your tales (of woe and otherwise) and to quote a bunch of you in the finished piece!
Topics I’d like to hear about:
- you just started dating and don’t know what to do about gifts — keep it cazh and impersonal, or splurge and risk getting a Groupon in return
- time to meet the in-laws…or not (the perils of meeting the fam, and when he visits them — but doesn’t invite you; when should you expect to undergo that ritual)
- one member of the couple makes way more money than the other; how do you finesse that
- out-gifting/under-gifting (i.e. you got him an engraved vintage flask and he got you Two-Buck Chuck, or vice versa)
- his gift sucked
- you get the feeling your gift sucked
- feeling “too single” around the holidays
- insecurity around New Year’s plans/standing next to a kissable candidate at midnight
- whose parents’ house do we go to
- negotiating differing religious traditions
- negotiating differing present-opening traditions (he insists on Eve, you say it’s a sacrilege)
- breaking up around the holidays
- hooking up around the holidays, or, “That’s The Last Time I Stay Late At The Office Party”
- holiday marriage proposals — and what happens when they don’t come through
Anything else I didn’t mention, feel free to add or embroider; any questions, also let me know. Keep in mind that, in order to use your story, I will need your real name, date of birth, and locational info, but you don’t have to post that, of course; just use a valid email address on your comment, and I’ll contact you directly (or the research department will). Or you can email your helliday stories straight to me for greater privacy: bunting at tomatonation dot com.
Please feel free to forward, or put me in touch with friends — thanks!
Tags: Ask The Readers happy hellidays
Gents, I’d like to hear from you too — specifically on best/worst gifts you’ve gotten, or the ways in which women tend to overthink or get gifts “wrong.”
Once things get rolling I will share the heartwarming tale of how a throw-in gift — a two-dollar switch-comb from Archie McPhee — totally “won” Chrismukkah, to my mingled pride and dismay.
My partner and I had been living together for about 6 months and I had yet to meet his family. So, that Christmas, we decided to take the train from southern Ontario to his hometown in northwestern Ontario. It was a 24 hour train ride but we were students and couldn’t afford to get there any other way. I knew it was far away but I wasn’t quite prepared for how far we were actually going. The train ride actually took a total of 36 hours because we had several technical delays – one lasted about 6 hours sitting stalled outside of Hornepayne, Ontario surrounded by snow, snowmachines, and the biggest pine trees I’d ever seen. To compound things, we were both vegetarians and hadn’t planned well for the trip. The only veg options from the canteen were bearclaws or stale chocolate chip muffins so we ended up in the dining car for 3 meals (2 lunches and 1 dinner). The only vegetarian option in the dining car was lasagna so lasagna we ate, and ate, and ate.
We were on the train so long that I developed an enormous pimple on my cheek where it absolutely couldn’t be missed – not really the way I wanted to meet his family but what could be done? The biggest shock was that his hometown doesn’t actually have a train station. The train stops at a railway crossing in the middle of a forest with a dirt road leading up to it. There wasn’t even a shelter there. Just the crossing and the road, a tremendous amount of snow and those huge freaking trees. His mom was supposed to pick us up at the crossing but I guess all the delays threw things off because she wasn’t there. Because of how isolated this crossing was, the conductor wouldn’t let us off the train unless our ride was there. Apparently, we would freeze to death before we reached the first signs of civilization. Without a ride, we’d have to stay on the train for another 4 hours until we got to Winnipeg.
Thankfully, another passenger was getting off. She’d met a guy online and was coming for her first in-person visit. He had a truck so he let us hop in the back – it was -45 Celcius – and headed towards town. We spotted my partner’s mom along the way so our truck ride was almost short enough to bear. I was greasy, exhausted, felt queezy from the lack of sleep and the horror of thinking I’d have to be on the train for another four hours and it just wasn’t the best way to meet someone. As we headed towards town, his mom said, “you guys must be tired and hungry. You can have dinner as soon as we get home. I made vegetarian lasagna.” I didn’t groan, but I did entertain jumping out of the car so they could run me over.
I’m pretty sure the rest of the holiday was lovely but no other part of the week stands out for me the way that train ride did.
The first Christmas my college boyfriend and I spent together he bought me a diamond necklace. Wow. And I bought him green boxers. His was way too much, mine probably too little. Awkwardness ensued.
When we were still dating, my now-husband gave me a crockpot for Christmas. It was my first semester in graduate school, I was overwhelmed and not eating well, and he was making a well-intentioned attempt to reduce my stress level by giving me an easy way to make myself dinner.
My mother tried to warn him that it wasn’t a good idea, but he didn’t listen. And a crockpot would have been a great gift from my mom (or from his mom — it’s a perfectly acceptable from-mom gift). But it’s not so much what you get your girlfriend of three years, especially when she bought you a leather Flyers jacket for Christmas, you know? (When in doubt, buy me books or gift cards for books. I’m not that complicated.)
It’s been more than ten years since then, and he remains baffled about why it was a bad present. Now, though, he runs his present ideas past my mom and our friends first, which has helped a lot because they tell him to buy me books.
Maybe not exactly what you have in mind, but I’ll get the ball rolling…
My husband and I have been married for almost 2 years, together for 7, and have spent exactly 2 New Year’s Eves together in that time. And not because we’re working, deployed, etc.
I love low key, sushi, watching black and white movies ’til almost midnight, Dick Clark till 12:05, then back to the movies. My husband’s friends have one of those parties with loud, loud music and people dancing (at the very least, sometimes much worse) on the tables, etc. We each HATE the other’s party. Mine is too low key for him, his is way too high key(?) for me.
So we call each other at 12:02, right after Auld Land Syne, and spend all the next day nursing our hangovers together. Yeah, it’s probably weird, but it works for us.
His friends are used to my “overdeveloped hearing” (it’s really the loud that I hate). And my friends love hearing his stories about the party. Seriously, the stories we’ve heard…
I’m choosing “whose parents’ house do we go to” because: seriously. And every year, we go through this. (Partner’s male, his family’s Catholic and located in one city. I’m female, my family’s…scattered in so many ways.)
Our options, in reverse order of my partner’s preference, apply to both Thanksgiving and Christmas:
1: our mid-sized Midwestern city’s suburb with my mother unless she’s going to…
1a: my maternal grandparents’ Midwestern home two hours east.
2: our mid-sized Midwestern city’s suburb with my father’s sister, mother, et cetera unless they’re going to…
2a: my father’s home on the east coast (now in two locations!)
3: partner’s parents’ home or his grandparents’ home two hours west.
My mother and father are divorced; my partner’s family and my maternal grandparents are the only religious ones, so it seems weird to spend Christmas with a different group.
partner’s mother has a Thanksgiving birthday last year, so we went there for both actual holidays and observed early and late holidays with my side. Christmas with my maternal grandparents was December 30; I had lunch with my paternal grandmother before I headed to my mom’s to head out.
I just wanna eat green bean casserole and eat crescent rolls. We are not in a position to host everyone, nor could we get everyone into the same room at the same time even if we could.
The Dude and I started dating mid-January 2010. And as silly as this might sound (especially coming from a woman in her 30s), we knew from the first few dates that we were headed somewhere serious. Fast forward a few weeks, and we’re still flying high, but…what to do about Valentine’s Day? We weren’t in Iloveyoulandia, yet. More like Iloveyoulandia adjacent. To know me is to know that I don’t really care for VD (heh). I never went on a rant about how it’s a manufactured holiday created by the greeting card industry blah blah blah bittercakes. I’ve always felt that if you want to do something special for someone you love/like a whole damn lot, do it whenever you want. This one day out of the year shouldn’t dictate your displays of affection or romanticism. I shared this with The Dude and followed up with, “So you totally don’t need to get me anything.” Which he followed with, “Well, is it OK that I did? I don’t know if it’ll be here in time, though. I saw it and thought ‘this is totally her.'” Yeah, this is where I felt like a complete jerk because I hadn’t gotten him anything. And up to that point, I felt OK about not having gotten him a gift because I felt certain he hadn’t gotten me one either. Enh, well. I didn’t go out and get him something. Why? See above. And he was fine with that. On VD, he asked me what I wanted to do. I said, “I want to go bowling, eat lots of pizza, and drink some beer.” So we did. And it was a complete and total blast. We decided to make it our VD thing. We couldn’t do it this year because San Francisco was drenched in rain. So we stayed in, watched The Big Lebowski, ate pizza, and drank some beer. Oh, and the gift he got me? It was this Marc Johns drawing (opens in a new tab/window). And yup, that is totally me.
Ugh…the perils of starting a relationship around any card-giving holiday. There are NO CARDS that express that you like someone you are dating. Instead there are hearts and love declarations and poems and odes to the feelings that stir in your soul. Seriously, why hasn’t hallmark cornered this market yet? Cards for your new significant other in that period before you are madly in love?! You are forced to buy the lame blank cards and then stress over the message to write inside.
It is funny how often a throwaway gift will end up being the best. I was once in WalMart on Dec 24 with my dad and he asked me to suggest some good stocking stuffers for my mom. There was a huge bin of nail polish and I picked one and said it looked like a color she would like. Well…she freaked out the next day, it was a color that she loved but had been discontinued and she had been searching for it! (Not sure how that story is helpful except maybe that overthinking it sometimes doesn’t work and just thinking about what the person actually uses does.)
A few years ago, my boyfriend and I of two years broke up a couple weeks before Thanksgiving. Things had been rocky for awhile; I even had friends who had a bet that we would be together at least until January because I wouldn’t want to “break up and be alone right before the holidays.” I didn’t find out about that bet til after we broke up, of course, but I couldn’t deny that it had crossed my mind. Breaking up is a suckfest, why compound it with holiday fucking cheer? But, when it’s time, it’s time, so we broke up, and I was filled with dread. A week after we broke up, my friends hosted our annual Thanksgiving dinner, in advance of spending Thanksgiving with our actual families. I remember sitting on the couch after dinner, with all of my other friends snuggling in on the couch with their partners, and I had to get out. I hated myself for feeling sorry for myself, but I cried the whole way home, miserable that I was facing two months of events as a newly single.
A few weeks later, a battle with a Christmas tree changed my outlook. Every year, my friends and I go to a U-cut farm to cut down our Christmas trees. I went as my single self, with my couple friends, but this was nothing new. My boyfriend had never come on this excursion, a fact that suddenly seemed to lend more credence to having made the Right Decision. I was feeling good. I cut my tree and brought it home, and my friends tried to help me put it up but we couldn’t get it to stay in the stand. We’d had a long day, and I felt badly for keeping them, so I told them I’d figure it out later, and to go on home. When they left, my heart filled with lonliness and I started to cry for the millionth time since my breakup. I didn’t even have someone to help me put up my tree! I wept and wished my cats could do more than just sniff and slink around the foreign object. After a few moments, I got angry with myself. Ridiculous! All this self-pity is ridiculous! I called both my siblings, who live in town. No answer. I called another friend. No answer. My brief empowerment dissolved and I started sniffling again. The part of me that wasn’t weighted down by the irrationalities of post-breakup grief told me to get a grip, that I didn’t need anyone to do anything, and I could do it myself. I grabbed my 6 foot noble fir and slammed it into the stand, then, my arm gripping the trunk as high up as I could while crouching on the floor, I held my tree upright with one arm and twisted the metal screws with the other.
I twisted and twisted, but no matter how much I twisted and adjusted and imagined my moment of glory, the tree would not stabilize. The trunk was crooked and there were branches in the way. I didn’t have a saw, so I grabbed my serrated bread knife and attacked the lowest branch. I sawed and dulled and sawed until it came off, and I shouted in triumph. I tried again to put the tree in the stand. I spent 45 full minutes twisting and cursing and laughing and shouting at the tree stand. I did NOT want to be defeated, but my arm was getting tired. Finally, I put the tree down, again in tears. But this time, the tears were not those of self-pity, they were tears of frustration. I threw on my coat and ran to the store to buy a saw. It was past 9pm. I came home and began sawing the trunk of that tree off like “how dare you not fit into this fucking tree stand you WILL cooperate because I can do this myself, GODDAMN IT, I don’t need help from anyone let alone an asshole who can’t even tell me he loves me for two whole fucking years just fall OFF ALREADY JESUS CHRIST!” The trunk sawed off, I grabbed the tree again and started to twist. Still no tension. This was not gonna happen. I spent another 45 minutes with the tree, and at the end of it, I was too furious even for tears. I stalked around the house a bit, but I felt that strange clarity you get sometimes when you experience intense emotion. I knew there was nothing else to be done, so I went to bed.
That rage, it did something for me. I went to bed pissed, but I’d been told for years that I needed to find my anger, and I’m pretty sure I’d just found it. My whole grief process shifted. Oh, I was still sad, but mostly, I was angry, but in the good way, because that anger had been bottled up for a long, long time. I saw that the holiday season was a blessing, because there is so much going on. You don’t have to work so hard to distract yourself, and someone is always inviting you to this or that, and I found myself surrounded by friends and family. I have actually recommended that that people breakup before the holidays because it’s a built-in distraction. I also realized that some things you cannot actually do yourself. The day after my battle with the tree, I asked my friends to come back over to help me put it up, and we did our best to wedge it in there. It still amazes me that it never fell over, so precariously it was placed in there. The next Christmas, I bought a new tree stand.
My husband proposed to me at Christmas time with a Lite-Brite. I’d been complaining that my sister, who is 8 years younger than I am, had lost all the pegs for mine (plus half of my castle Legos, the original shoes for my Cabbage Patch dolls, etc.) while I was away at college. One of my Christmas gifts was a new Lite-Brite, in which my now-husband had painstakingly spelled out, “Will you marry me?” (Apparently, this took several tries to fit on one screen.)
This has begun a long tradition of him buying me just the right thing and me having no clue what to buy him. :)
These are great, people. Keep ’em coming! Tell friends!
The first Christmas I spent with my now-husband’s extended family, we visited for more than a week and stayed over New Year’s. His mom insisted that I eat black-eyed peas as part of some family tradition. I hate black-eyed peas. She overheard me making fun of it to some of the other family, and it made her cry. Nothing like making his mom cry when you’re trying to make a good impression on his family! But, years have gone by and we gave her a grandchild, so I assume it’s forgiven. And I learned a valuable lesson: Sometimes, you need to shut the hell up and swallow a spoonfull of peas. I just wish I hadn’t learned that lesson the hard way. I still feel bad about it, actually!
Okay, two good stories.
First, my husband proposed to me, on Christmas Day in front of my entire family. When one of my brothers congratulated him on his courage after I had said yes, he looked around the room and said “Well, I figured I wouldn’t be seeing any of you again if she’d said no”.
The Christmas after that one? He forgot to by me any presents at all. For reals. We both had to work Christmas Eve, and we were driving home long after the mall had closed at the end of the day (we commuted together in those days), and out of the blue, he pops out with “oh shit. I just realized I forgot to get your presents”. I was convinced that it was an elaborate joke with an awesome surprise at the end of it, but he had really just… forgotten. I couldn’t even really get that mad, since there wasn’t really anything to be done about it, you know?
My boyfriend and I had been dating for 7 months when he came home with me for Thanksgiving.
Important point #1 – This was his first time meeting any of my family.
Point #2 – Boyfriend is generally self-conscious about weight he gained during a knee injury.
Point #3 – boyfriend has two parents (still married) and two sisters (both married, with 3 kids between the two of them). The MAXIMUM count for their holiday meals is 10, and that rarely happens.
Cue my family. Divorced parents. Both remarried. One biological sibling and 6 step-siblings (5 married, 10 kids amongst them) and huge, extended family that participate in EVERY holiday. We do Thanksgiving over two days and a combined total of 83 people pass through the house.
So needless to say he was overwhelmed, but handling it really well. Until my grandfather tells him that he reminds him of someone.
BF: Oh really? Who?
Gramps: Some chef!
Me: *silently*please say Gordon Ramsay, or Bobby Flay. HELL! I’ll take Alton Brown!*
Gramps: GUY FIERI!!
BF: **OPENMOUTH HORRIFIED SILENCE**
Then my 17 yr old cousin announced that he and his girlfriend of 3 weeks were pregnant.
end scene.
My now husband and I had been dating for awhile and were on the same page that this was the Real Thing when I went to meet his family for the first time at Christmas in California. His parents, (who, after an apparent streak of tattoed, pierced, goth girls, were thrilled and somewhat stunned he was bringing home a blond lawyer), decided they were going to throw a giant party so pretty much anyone who had ever met them could meet me.
We made it to California just fine. Our luggage? Did not. The first night I met my mother in law I had to borrow a pair of her pajamas. They were satin.
We picked up our luggage the next day and finally I was able to shower and change out of the clothes I had been wearing for 36 hours, and I was feeling kind of good, until I was helping his mother put together cheese plates for the party and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was ice cold, then hot, and super nauseaus. To this day I have never been that sick in my life.
But! I am meeting the family! There is a party in my honor! I cannot be sick! So I spent the entire party introducing myself to a person or two, making small talk, then “having to go to the bathroom”, where I would throw up, every 20 minutes or so. I alternated bathrooms and no one, at all, even got remotely suspicious. (This may be because another party guest actually SET HIMESELF ON FIRE, and it is hard to top that.)
Anyway, my husband’s best friend for years thought I was lame and boring because I went “to bed” right after the party slowed down, which really meant curling up in a ball on the bathroom floor and praying I would be able to make the five hour drive into the mountains to his grandmother’s house instead of forcing the whole family to spend Christmas in the ER.
Luckily, I was feeling somewhat better the next day and could make the drive. However, once we got to Grandma’s my now husband came down with the same thing… and the whole family got it a week later.
However, I still have a great relationship with my in-laws, I just make sure to pack pj’s in my carry on.
In the “His Gift Sucked” category… this guy I was dating during university was a super hippie and so I really should have anticipated his not being into Christmas gifts (but we all have to be 20 and stupid at some time, so.), but I went ahead and got a pretty decent gift anyways. Lovely chess set, ordered specifically from a chess store. His gift to me? An issue of Bitch and a tube of hand cream. I wish so hard that I was making that up.
Back when Mr. Beadgirl was still Beadfiance, and we were living in separate cities, I remember hearing all about his Christmas shopping in the weeks before Christmas. Specifically, the care and thought and expense he was putting into gifts for his mother and sister and secretary. And then, Christmas eve (or perhaps the 23rd), during one of our phone calls, he offhandedly mentions that he never got around to figuring out a present for me so he was going to get a couple of books off my Amazon wishlist.
Now, I don’t consider myself a materialistic person, and I’m not into shopping and buying lots of stuff. I love getting presents, but I also consider a candy bar to be a great present. And I adore books, and you can never go wrong getting me one. And I knew Beadfiance loved me. And I knew that I could see this as a compliment, that he considered me low-maintenance in this way.
But still — it kinda annoyed me. Perhaps it was the way he said it, so dismissive. So I chose to deal with it by teasing him, which was fun.
Nowadays, as the holidays (and my birthday) approach, I send him an email with a list of things I would love to get (including books and chocolate and bead kits), and he picks from that.
This one falls into the “be careful what you say, because you don’t know what they’ll pick up on” category. Oh, and gifts.
I’m overweight and bitch about it, a lot. Well, my darling husband (HUSBAND, not new boyfreind but man who is married to me), who hates shopping with a passion, went out on his annual Gift Grumble Shopping trip and, knowing me and my bookwormish ways, bought me some books.
Cookbooks. But not just any cookbooks.
DIET cookbooks. The Skinny Bitch ones.
I sat there with them on my lap and really, genuinely had no idea what to say. It wasn’t snark or meanness of any kind–he’s obviously heard my endless whining about my figure and thought “Aha!” But really? He’s that clueless about modern “you don’t say a word even if her chair explodes” etiquette in these matters?
I tried to make the best of it and even contemplated making some of the recipes, but looking through them, they turned out to be hard core vegan tomes–I have nothing against vegan diets, but I’m not going on one. So after a week or so, I gently told him I needed the reciepts and exchanged them for some novels.
Lessons learned? 1)Quit complaining about yourself. and 2)Make a list. Surprises may work out sometimes, but it’s best to just take that factor out of the equation.
A couple of years ago, I bought my husband a very nice flat screen TV. Spent gobs of time researching it, enlisted my FIL for approval and help hiding it, thought I did a great job.
Christmas day, I’m sitting there ALL excited, waiting for him to get to the surprise. He hands me a huge box, wrapped all fancy, and says very proudly, “Merry Christmas!! You are going to LOVE this!!” I open it and lo and behold, my beloved bought me a trash can. A fancy, touchless high tech trash can, but a TRASH CAN. There was a moment of stunned silence. My MIL and SIL were horrified. We spent a good hour that night with me crying and him apologizing.
The trash can went back. The next year he bought me diamond earrings.
Ladies (and also gentlemen, as the advice I’m giving probably applies to men; just switch up the genders as needed):
A gift you give, particularly for someone special in your life should be first and foremost about giving something special they want in return for the kindness you’ve received over the length of your relationship. Your gift should show that you put some time and effort into the gift (whether it’s something you searched for, something you spent time thinking about, or something you spent time making) and really thought about the OTHER person first. It should be something that demonstrates that you know who the other person is and what that person likes. If he hates socializing, a quiet dinner alone is better than a big hooplah at a chain restaurant. If he has a favorite food, cooking that for him shows you remember things he likes and want to make him happy.
This list doesn’t include those things I just wrote about:
– A Bible. (My super religious girlfriend at the time was worried I’d go to Hell, so she got me a new one. It was the first of many attempts at religious conversion.)
– One of those shirts you get for signing up with a credit card company, with the credit card company logo on the front. (She was very poor and couldn’t afford a “nice gift”. Credit cards turned out to be one of the reasons why.)
– Chicken Soup for the Soul. (I’m sure it’s a nice gift for lots of people, but it clearly demonstrates she doesn’t understand the kind of books I *really* like to read.)
– A Toni Braxton CD. (I like lots of different music and listen to lots of female singers, but my tastes in female singers gravitate more towards Garbage, Paramore, and Evanescence and less towards Toni Braxton and Celine Dion.)
– A box filled with sand and rocks. (I don’t get it either. It’s sand and rocks. ?!?! Moving on…)
– Flowers (I can appreciate their beauty, but it’s a rather awkward gift and I think speaks measures of what SHE would like, not what *I* would like.)
– A bag of oranges. (We met in college and she saw me eat lots of fruit in the dorm cafeteria. So, she got me a 10 lb. bag of oranges. No wrapping, no ribbon, no gift tag, just a bag of oranges, which turned out to be more than I could eat before they started to get moldy, since I still ate all my meals in the dorm cafeteria, so I had to throw some out.)
– Cucumber soup. (My gf tried really, really hard to make me a nice meal, but didn’t realize there’s a reason why I left cucumbers on another plate from my salads and constantly asked for no pickles on sandwiches and hamburgers. I had mentioned it several times, but I guess it just never stuck. She did most of the talking and I guess not enough listening when I spoke about me, not her. I detest few things more than cucumbers, which make my physically sick and trigger my gag reflex. I took a few small, polite sips, but it’s hard to mask the sensation of nausea and she quickly realized that making a dish centered around my most hated food wasn’t a good idea.)
Lessons learned? 1)Quit complaining about yourself. and 2)Make a list.
Ladies and germs, meet the new author of The Vine. Because this brother can’t do better than that shit.
My partner of 10 years is an only child, used to getting huge piles of presents for Christmas. I am the middle child of three, used to getting a few presents, but generally not making a fuss about Christmas, birthdays, etc. I find it hard to get worked up about the presents and generally buy a few things off his Amazon wishlist. This backfired last Christmas, when a small amount of snow in the UK meant that the entire country shut down for 3 weeks. Amazon wasn’t delivering, but I figured that I could go into town and actually buy something physically in the week before Christmas — except that I slipped over and broke my wrist, so spent the week doped up on codeine and feeling sorry for myself. Result: he had no presents, I spent most of the day asleep, and he had to cook the elaborate dinner I’d planned. Not a great day.
I broke up with a long-term boyfriend between Christmas and New Year. I know, I’m horrible. It was a long-distance thing where my feelings had honestly died a death about six months before, but I was young and felt guilty about dumping someone who was so much more into me, so I put it off. My mom told me I couldn’t dump him before his exams (that were in May of the following year! Really bad advice, thanks mom) and that was my plan but seeing him over the Christmas break bought it home to me that I couldn’t stand him, and I couldn’t stand to be near him (he tried to kiss me and I’d make funny faces and back away). But I felt I couldn’t do it just before Christmas, and then his Christmas presents just confirmed my thoughts ( I can’t remember what I got him but he got me a Charlies Angels poster which was really really not what I wanted. I mean, I was young, but I was 18 not 14, and thought I was sophisticated and cosmopolitan).
It was better than the first time I dumped him though, which was when we were naked and I realised I couldn’t bear to have sex with him to shut him up one more time. GOD KNOWS why I went out with him again after that – I think of myself as a nice person, not someone who takes one look at a naked person and says ‘You know what? Instead of having sex, I think we should break up. I don’t love you any more.’
I’m sure we are both much better off apart. I have never been that mean to someone before or since these two episodes.
He later told me I was being an idiot to break up with him, because other men don’t wash their private parts.
I learned the hard way that my mother-in-law requires a list for all gift-giving occasions. Sadly, I learned this the hard way. The first few years that I got odd presents (I’m sure the carrot julienner was very nice, as those things go…), I chalked it up to her not knowing me well. But by the time my husband and I had been together for 4 years, I kind of expected more. Christmas morning, I opened my very own, very pink tool kit. Now, I’d lived alone for several years, had hung a few pictures, put together a few “some assembly required” items – so I had what I needed. Now I was also the proud owner of pink handled EVERYTHING. And, since it was for girls (or maybe since it was cheap) everything was really flimsy. I tried, I really did, to use that hammer. But it didn’t have enough weight to hammer anything into, well, anything. So on the occasion of our next move, the pink tool kit had a bit of an accident and fell down the garbage chute. And I started making a Christmas list.
I took my then-boyfriend-current-husband to my mother’s house for their first meeting. She had cooked dinner, as well as set the table with the fancy china and the white tablecloth. During dinner, we had red wine in nice crystal glasses. Boyfriend was buttering a roll and went to get some more butter with his knife. He somehow managed to cut through the stem of the wine glass with the knife, knocking the bowl of the glass onto the table, spilling the entire glass of red onto the white linen tablecloth. My mother just looked at him as he apologized profusely and said, “Better you than me.”
I suppose this is one of those “it turned out for the best in the end” stories.
I was single pretty much all the way through to my late 20s. I always RSVPed for two for weddings, thinking that I might have a boyfriend by the time the nuptials rolled around. (I always waited until the last minute and then dragged along a platonic friend.) For New Year’s, I dreamt of the glorious midnight kiss, setting myself up, year after year after year, for being drunken and despondent while everybody else made out.
Then about five years ago, some good friends of mine decided to get married. On New Year’s Eve.
I did my usual dual RSVP–not realizing that, of course, my platonic friends had better ways to spend their New Year’s. And I had to get a hotel room, which also put a damper in landing a casual date. But the bride knew that this was a possibility and it wound up not being a big deal to go solo. There were several good, fun friends coming, and we all got to sit at the same table–the one right next to the bar–so I actually looked forward to it.
Of course, I’d already made kind of a big deal about being single, so that night, my friends pushed a bit to set me up with the best man. This of course made me very self-conscious.
Turned out, the guy wasn’t really my thing, and the first thing he did was flirt with one of the other girls in the group. That didn’t make me feel great, but meh, whatever. What .really. slammed the door was when he came over to our table after his speech, saying he’d forgotten to tell the story about the first time the groom described the bride to him: “He was like, ‘Dude, I met this girl, and she’s A LIBERAL.’ And I was like ‘WHOA!’ ‘Cause we’re totally not…” At midnight I passionately made out with my good friend Jim Beam.
The moral of the story is that I actually had a great time .and. avoided hooking up out of desperation. And, at the after-party at a nearby bar, the then-very-drunk best man insulted the DJ’s equipment (…seriously) and almost got his ass kicked. I got to go home to a lovely, quiet hotel room, and I had the whole bed to myself.
My grandmother used to get my mother (her then daughter-in-law) weight watcher cookbooks as Christmas presents. Unlike the gifts from Jen. S’s husband, this was not some innocent faux pas. She thought Mom was too fat, and was using a Christmas present to let her know.
I don’t have a good story (yet,) but I’m loosely planning a “come meet my parents” trip with my boyfriend, to possibly coincide with an upcoming holiday – all three parties involved live in different states, so there would be extensive travel. In my mind, this could totally be a casual, no-pressure thing.
Please try to contain your laughter.
Okay, just had to come back to add to my multi-point list what happened last year at Christmas.
We were waiting for official go to open presents at my partner’s grandmother’s home. We have been dating for years. I had just been there for Thanksgiving. I asked when we could open presents.
His aunt– who I’ve met SEVERAL YEARS IN A ROW– told me after my first year I’d know the routine.
I told her I didn’t, and it wasn’t, and hi, I’m so-and-so’s partner? That you’ve met? Before? Not new? Hi?
Ok, I have two for you…
My ex-husband once got me a set of pink golf clubs for my birthday (I think, I don’t remember what the occasion was)… I have never once, in my life played golf, or EVER expressed any interest in picking it up (I HAVE given myself a black eye while drinking out of a large water bottle, so the odds of me killing someone with golf clubs is HIGH)… HE didn’t even play golf so it wasn’t like a “Let me get this so we can do something together” type of thing. I still have them, apparently they’re good clubs, but WHY???
My ex-husband’s family is very odd about gifts. They’re the type of people who pick up on something you say you like and then that’s your “thing” so everything you get for any occasion is related to that theme. Thus I became “duck girl” by complete accident and with no warning. You see, when registering for our wedding I saw a clear toilet seat that had rubber duckies frozen in time inside it. Lots of teeny rubber duckies inside a clear toilet seat. It was horrible, BUT I thought it was also HILARIOUS so I registered for it because in my head “heeeee! I just registered for toilet seat!! snicker snicker” AND THEN one of my funny funny friends bought it for me (I still can’t believe it, it was like $50 or something), I was then compelled to install it, and then I became Rubber Duckie girl. EVERYTHING I got was duckie themed, and I mean I don’t have a problem with ducks, but I don’t actually love them. I like turtles (hee). So like I said, everything was duck themed.
For Christmas one year his mom made everyone in the family fleece lounge suits (I don’t know what to call them, fleece pants and pullover hoodies that matched) we all got different colors, but I got a yellow one, with eyes and a bill sewed onto the hood, and duck feet slippers to match. Don’t get me wrong, it was hysterical and I wore it all day (and then much to my husband’s chagrin out to a party that evening) BUT… I’m still not a duck person. My ex-sister-in-law and I still laugh about it to this day. When she was getting married to a good friend of mine I pulled him aside and told him “Pick something you REALLY like and tell them, otherwise everything in your house will end up with a coca-cola classic theme because you just said you liked it.” he went with his favorite sports team instead and is a very happy camper.
My college boyfriend and I had been dating about 6 months or so- long enough for it to be considered long-term in my 20 year old head. He grew up on an Air Force base in Germany, and his mom still lived there, so for winter break, we decided to visit her, then spend Christmas with his family friends, who were a second family to him, Mom #2, essentially, who lived about 45 minutes outside of Cambridge, in England. It was my first time in Europe, super excited to meet his mom, etc.
There were SO MANY bad things about that trip. There was the fact that his mom wouldn’t really talk to me; she mostly talked near me, in my general vicinity. Then the fact that my boyfriend made plans to hang out with a female friend of his from high school, plans to which I wasn’t invited, leaving me either by myself with no transportation or with his mom (I ended up Christmas shopping with his mom- THAT was a treat). I almost flew home on that one. Then we traveled the cheapest possible way from Germany to England, which meant something like 4 trains plus the ferry; the ferry was late, which made us miss our train to Cambridge in London. It was the last train of the night, we had all of about 6p between us and no way to get more, no way even to call Mom #2 who was picking us up in Cambridge to tell us we missed the train, and it was freezing cold.
We spent a seriously long cold night on the sidewalk outside the train station (because they kicked us out between about midnight and 5:30), giving rise to the hilarious “time I had a bladder emergency and waited for the train station to open only to find that the toilet required change to work wah wah waaahhhh” story, took the train to Cambridge and was afraid to fall asleep because I was afraid we’d miss our stop. After having been picked up, we spent 45 minutes listening to Mom #2 berate us for having missed our train and not called to tell her. Made it to their house, collapsed gratefully in bed…
…only to be woken 3 hours later by Mom #2 (by flipping on the overhead lights in a dark room, no less) because she had been waiting for us to decorate the Christmas tree and just COULD NOT wait any longer. 30 hours straight traveling? 3 hours of sleep? Only the snacks that we had brought with us to eat for the past 15 hours? Mere trifles in the face of a Christmas tree that wanted decorating. That one almost led to me flying home early as well, when Boyfriend insisted that we drag ourselves downstairs and participate.
The final awful bit was when Mom #2 declined to drive us to Cambridge to catch our return train, even though we had only stopped at Cambridge at her insistence because she said she would drive us to and from. Turned out our return train was too early in the morning for her, but she didn’t tell us that until New Year’s Day, during which we could get no money for a ticket out of town. We prevailed on someone else- a complete stranger to me- to drive us at like 5:30 am to Cambridge.
I’ve never been so glad to get home! And in hindsight it is so so clear why the relationship didn’t last…
I’d been dating my now-husband for 8 months, living together for 4. We had bought each other enough small gifts that we could open some together on Christmas morning, some with my family on Christmas Day, and then the final ones with his family on Boxing Day, as they live 2 hours away. I had saved his most expensive present for last – a nice set of long underwear for cross country skiing. So, boring and practical. The last gift I opened? Was a jersey from our hockey team to wear to games and a little jewelry box. For a moment, I thought he was proposing and started to shake. (I mean, I wanted to – but not yet! And a proposal in front his parents? No thank you!) I finally managed to open the box and it was a pair of diamond earrings. I was shaking far too hard to put them in.
So: long underwear to diamonds. He was very gracious about it, thankfully…
(And he proposed 8 months later in Ireland, far far away from our families. MUCH better.)
Before we begin: yes, I’m an asshole who deserves to be single. Let’s just stipulate it now, eh?
Years ago I had an SO that REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY SUPER WANTED TO have us spend Christmas together. However:
(a) My mom had laid down the law with me that boyfriends of mine were NOT WELCOME at a holiday gathering unless I was married. Period. We do not welcome in transient boyfriends who may not be there next year. Likewise, it was also completely unacceptable for me to go spend the holidays with someone else’s family unless I was married and thus absolutely had to (and my dad was ill to boot). I don’t blame her for this policy and I actually agree with it, because mom’s in-laws never liked her and I totally understand the logic of not splitting the holidays before you are forced to. To this day I still find the concept of “just” boyfriends and girlfriends spending holidays together to be kinda wrong. And it had never even come up with anyone else I’d dated either, somehow.
(b) Even if the SO had been invited and welcome, I prefer to keep boyfriends and family apart from each other as much as I can possibly manage. As you can tell, my mom is very “He’s stealing my baby!” whenever I am dating someone, and she’ll nitpick every flaw of theirs. As for the other relatives, they don’t care about baby-stealing, but they are guaranteed not to like anyone I’m with and actually act even worse with the nitpicking. (As in, “what’s his name? I can go check his police record for ya.”) I don’t let people I like interact with my family if I can help it.
(c) While I got along with the SO’s family all right, I can’t say that I’d actually uh, want to spend the holiday with them. The SO told me that they pretty much did nothing for the day (not even decorations, barely any presents) and they were always broke anyway, so it sounded like they’d be sitting around the house watching TV the way they did the other 364 days of the year. Why would I want to do that if I didn’t absolutely have to?
So basically he whined at me for 3 months straight and I refused every time and it was stress and hell. He begged to spend the day in my apartment just the two of us if we had to– again, no way was I doing that. I would never hear the end of abandoning my family to sit in my apartment watching TV with a boy either. Ugh.
I am the only person on the planet who likes being single for the holidays.
I wish I had more to add on the theme, but I can’t resist saying that I love Sara’s story of the Christmas tree, her reserves of spinster strength, and how she discovered that fund of you WILL cooperate because I can do this myself, GODDAMN IT, I don’t need help from anyone let alone an asshole who can’t even tell me he loves me for two whole fucking years just fall OFF ALREADY JESUS CHRIST!” anger. That was wonderful.
I also loved V’s story of The Time Grandpa Dropped The Other F-Bomb, for completely different reasons.
The first time I met my in-laws was on Thanksgiving. I had been dating my now-husband since the beginning of that October, and we realized it was the Real Thing within about two weeks. At the end of October, I came down with viral pneumonia, spent four days in the hospital, and almost died. I spent November slowly recovering, and by Thanksgiving week, I was feeling a lot better. Until I woke up on Thanksgiving morning with a migraine.
I didn’t want to bail out on Thanksgiving because we were supposed to go to his parents’ house for dinner. My husband never had brought a girl home to meet the family before, and since he was 25 at this point, it was kind of a big deal. We made the 90-minute drive to his folks’ house, and I felt terrible: queasy, sweaty, barely able to hold my head up. I did my best to pretend like I was fine when we got to the house. I made it through introductions, and then it was time for dinner. My mother-in-law had gone all-out and made enough food for a dozen people even though there were only five of us (me, him, and his parents and sister).
I took one bite of turkey and bolted away from the table to throw up. Since I’d never been to their house, I didn’t know exactly where the bathroom was, but I *almost* found it before I started puking. I managed to keep things more-or-less…contained…until I could dive for the toilet. I actually felt a lot better after turning my entire being inside-out for a few minutes, so I cleaned myself up and made my way back to the dining room.
I felt so awkward about it all, but everyone was SO NICE. Fortunately, my mother-in-law is a longtime schoolteacher/mother of two, and my father-in-law spent 20 years in the Army, including a stint in Vietnam, so they weren’t really fazed by a little off-stage vomiting. I married their son the next July, and we just celebrated our eighth anniversary, so things turned out okay. I have a great relationship with my in-laws, possibly because I never had the opportunity to put on a facade of perfection. Regardless, it was one of the most embarrassing incidents of my life.
Just after I graduated from college I brought my then boyfriend to a family wedding. Said boyfriend and I had had a somewhat rocky relationship (he slept with one of my sorority sisters) but were back together and happy.
My mother can be somewhat…..formidable, and my large family is somewhat overwhelming to begin with, so I tried really hard not to leave him alone, but a girl’s got to pee every once in a while, and coming out of the bathroom I saw my mother and the boyfriend talking in the hallway. Not good. As I got closer, my mom walked away and the boyfriend was as white as a sheet. I asked him what happened, and he said, “Your mom told me that even though you seem tough on the outside, you’re really sensitive on the inside. And that if I ever hurt you again like I did before, she’d hunt me down and kill me. I’m pretty sure she was serious.”
I’m now 41 years old and I literally have not brought another guy home since.
*Explodes From Flattery Overload and collapses in heap*
Wow, seriously, this is a pinnacle of my posting life! Thanks, Sars!
Seriously though, it’s true. There’s nobody who isn’t going to get sick of constant bitching, and List + Internet = Happy Spouses on Christmas Day.
Our mutual giftgiving has improved expodentially since then–this past one left him the proud owner of a Sargent Hatred canteen and me a Hyperbole and a Half “CLEAN ALL THE THINGS!” apron, so. Proof that lists work wonders.
Meeting the inlaws.
In which one of them dies during the meeting. Bonus: meeting his wife!
I’m no longer with this person. Meeting my fiance’s parents, in contrast, was stress free for everyone involved.
Ungh… the first Christmas with my ex-husband was horrendous. HORRENDOUS. We’d been dating (erm, he’d been living at my apartment since the first date) since the beginning of October, and I was relishing the “togetherness” I felt with him and was excited to get to meet the rest of his family (mostly local). I wasn’t making that much money at the time (I think I was newly unemployed), and since he wasn’t, you know, helping to pay rent or bills or anything, and paying for 2 people to live somewhere isn’t cheap, I needed some cash. I wanted to buy gifts — good gifts — for him and his family, so I took a title loan out on my POS car. I was able to con the title loan people into giving me $400 (the car wasn’t worth $250), and I went on a shopping spree.
We were to spend Christmas day with his people, then go to my mom’s house and have dinner with her. It was Christmas Eve when I realized I hadn’t bought a gift for my mom, and I went running around trying to find *anywhere* that was open around 10pm on Christmas Eve. I ended up getting her a crappy windchime from Walgreen’s.
Christmas Day comes, and I give boyfriend his (well thought-out and expensive) gifts. He got me… a generic basket of bath stuff. I think it was maybe from Bath & Body Works. I *hate* those stinky stores. Then, he pulls out a ring… and it will only fit on my left ring finger (teeheehee?), and it’s made out of silver (meh). We get to his mom’s house, and all hell breaks loose. Passive-aggressiveness ensues, making me feel like sh!t, and probably everyone else too, only the whole family are sociopaths, one couldn’t tell. I give everyone their gifts, they don’t really care, and in return, I get TJ Maxx stationery from the mom. It had the price tag on — $5.
We finally got to my mom’s house, and at least had a good time over there. Boyfriend, of course, broke up with me about a week afterward (the first time of many; did I mention he’s the ex-husband?). It took me at least a year to pay off that title loan. Stupid-stupid-stupid. Don’t get title loans, kids. And remember – attempting to impress others with money is just a bad idea.
Thank goodness my current partner’s family are awesome and I’ve never had a passive-aggressive dinner with them! Yay for normalcy!
Ah yes, the list. I once thought the list was foolproof, but it has its pitfalls. I met my husband in June, so by the time Christmas came around that year, I thought we’d do ok on the gift giving. He asked me for a list, so I wrote one out for him. I listed “perfume” because he knows what kind I wear. I listed clothing items and sizes to be helpful.
What did he do, you ask? He promptly forwarded the entire list to his whole family so they could know my clothing sizes too. Yay! And I got quite a few weird-branded perfumes and body sprays as well.
The list now comes in two separate sections. He gets to choose from the first section and he can share the second section with his family. Lesson learned.
I went home with my then boyfriend (now husband) for Thanksgiving to meet his family, a little over a year after we started dating.
No preparation or flashcards, and I met 37 family members over the course of two days, because his parents decided to host it since I was coming. His immediate family plus me made 7 people staying in a 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom house in the middle of nowhere with NO ESCAPE from family.
The day after Thanksgiving, he proposed to me~then told me that was why his parents had all the relatives come, because apparently they all knew he was going to propose and thought it’d be a good idea to throw me into the whole family all at once.
I married him (after a LONG engagement, because only dating for a year was a bit short for me) but his family and I still have our differences (politics and religion, which I am cool with not discussing at all, but his folks are militantly evangelical about).
My favorite “meeting the family” story is not mine, but my friend Amy’s. She had several strikes against her before she met her then-boyfriend’s parents. She was 15 years younger than he was (barely out of her teens) and Jewish (to his family’s Christian). Desperate to proove she wasn’t a teenybopper bimbo, she was perhaps too enthusiastic about the dinner menu.
BF’s mom: We are having calamari. I hope you like it.
Amy: I love anything with testicles!
(cue horrified silence)
It gets worse. In an attempt to demonstrate that she knew the difference between testicles and tentacles, Amy worked the word into conversation again.
BF’s dad: Would you care for some more, Amy?
Amy: Yes, please pass me those testicles!
Happily, his family did eventually welcome their pervy DIL, and the couple has been blissfully married for 12 years now.
30 years ago, I went home with my boyfriend, D, for Thanksgiving, to a suburb of New Orleans; we were both 18. My first conversation with his mother went as follows:
M: “[Isis] is this your first trip away from home?”
I: “No ma’am, I spend a lot of time with my friends here in New Orleans.”
M: “Oh, is this your first to New Orleans?”
I: “No ma’am, I spend a lot of time with my friends here in New Orleans.”
I went on to marry D, when I was pregnant for our son, who turned 27 two weeks ago. We were married for 11 years. D was not such a good listener, either. This one isn’t a holiday gift story, just a “something he got me” one: In 1987, I saw the Bruce Willis/Kim Bassinger movie “Blind Date.” I did NOT like it, and said as much to anyone who’d listen. A year or so later, he decided to rent a movie for me to watch so while he was out. He proudly held up the VHS of “Blind Date.” I asked “Why did you rent me that? I really didn’t like it.” He pouted and said “I thought you liked it.”
As with other stories posted here, I was once given (by a coworker, I think) a book, “because I know you like to read.” The book was “Chicken Soup for the Woman’s Soul.” Though I wasn’t then an atheist, I was nevertheless the type of non-sentimental, skeptical person who would eventually become one.
@Lis, sing it! My mother was nearly forced from her home by a flood of black and white cow themed stuff after she carelessly mentioned she was fond of said cows. She had to call a clear and dramatic halt to all moo-themed merchandise out of fear of becoming “that crazy cow lady.”
@patricia: geesh. You win.
When I was growing up I was totally the kid who had to know what her present was in advance. I’d spend hours sitting by the tree shaking my Christmas gifts trying to figure out what was inside. And before the gifts were under the tree, I’d snoop around the house hoping to find an unwrapped gift hidden in the back of the closet or shoved up in the attic. When I was in middle school I finally just resorted to opening my presents up early. I’d very, very carefully peel back a small part of the wrapping paper, see what was inside, and then tape it back up. I did this for *years* and never got caught; I finally confessed this to my mom when I was in my mid-20s and we had long since defaulted to gift cards — she was completely shocked that her usually so-well-behaved daughter could be so devious and she never suspected a thing.
It wasn’t so much that I wanted the present. I just wanted to know what it was. Once I found out, I was perfectly happy to wait until Christmas morning before I played with my new toys, or rode my new bike, or listed to my new tapes. But the suspense and the anticipation just overwhelmed me and I HAD TO KNOW!
Cut to about 5 years ago. I’d been dating M for about 6 months and we were approaching our first Christmas together. Even though he knew I was horrible with surprises and secrets he had no idea about my insatiable need to find out what my presents were (I obviously hadn’t told him about my past present openings). About two weeks before Christmas I was over at his house and he casually mentioned that he had bought my Christmas present that day. It was in a medium size gift bag and just taped closed at the top. It would have been super easy for me to open that baby up, find out what was inside, and he would have never known. However, because I loved him and he was so proud of the gift he’d gotten me (WHATEVER THAT WAS!?! gah!) and I knew he was “the one” I didn’t betray his trust and open the damn bag.
But, oh, did I want to open it. Every time he left the room I’d go and stand over the bag, directly over it, squinting as hard as I could, just hoping that I’d be able to see something through that tiny sliver of an opening. I didn’t dare pick it up for fear that I wouldn’t be able to control myself and I’d rip it open.
I’d zone out during commercials, comparing the product against my bag, thinking, “Well, it can’t be a coffee maker ’cause it’s too small. It can’t be perfume ’cause it’s too big. It can’t be a ham ’cause that would require refrigeration. It can’t be a lite-brite ’cause I’m not six.”
My best friend, who knew the story about my previous present opening, started greeting me with “Have you opened it yet?” This became one of our main topics of (totally one-sided) conversation. When I told my mom she just laughed and said that it was good that I was “finally” learning patience.
Somehow I made it to Christmas without cracking. I was super proud of myself but right after opening the gift (an electric fondue pot; I had mentioned wanting one), I blurted out the whole story and made him promise to never, ever torture me like that again. He was totally stunned — no idea I’d been so worked up over my present. I really think that was the first time he saw just how crazy and obsessive I could be. He also seemed genuinely touched that I didn’t snoop despite the fact that I wanted to and had done so in the past. I now consider that entire experience a really good moment in building and strengthening our relationship.
Today, we’re happily married and he just completely avoids mentioning Christmas gifts (or birthday gifts or anniversary gifts) until that day, when he’ll go out to his car (or best friend’s house — yes, he stores my gift at another house!) and retrieve whatever incredibly thoughtful give he’s gotten me.
I think one of the biggest and easiest to make offences is about a new SO’s weight. When I first went to visit my fiance(now husband)’s family in Missouri, the first thing his mother said to me was, “You’ve gained weight!”. Nice. Way to make the new girl feel uncomfortable right off the bat.
After getting to know his whole family in MO, I can see that my slim, ballet-dancing self must have looked undernourished to her at first, and she thought she was giving me a compliment. Also, with time and perspective, I have learned that diet/food/recipe/weight-gained-or-lost stories are just a big part of any conversation with my Mother-in-law, and it’s a waste of time getting offended. But, I’m still doing my best to help my sister-in-law get over the “losing weight for the wedding” comment from the same culprit…
Oh! And because I failed to mention the holidays involved in my story: my visit to his folks’ was for the 4th of July, and the additional comment to my SIL was over Christmas. Sorry ’bout that.
My husband and I both grew up in different parts of the country, and now live 12 hours away from both of our families. We are extremely lucky in that our families get along well with each other, and we love them all but they are all together too much for us at once (20+ people in our teeny city apartment is just too much, and we won’t be doing that again), and spending two of our precious few vacation days stuck in the airport due to bad weather is too stressful and depressing. Now, we will do anything our families want us to do for Easter, Thanksgiving, or any other holiday, but we spend our Chiristmases now with a small group of friends, eating Ethiopian, Indian, or dim sum and watching un-holiday movies. It’s fun, easy, and oddly festive! Looking forward to this year’s Peking duck…
The first time my boyfriend-now-husband spoke to/met my parents, it was after an international flight and two domestic ones (Japan to SF to Boston) and it was the year when both of my grandmothers had died. (I hadn’t seen my parents for a year, either.) We were both jet-lagged and in that weird state of traveling where you know you want to sleep but are trying overly hard to stay awake. We get off the plane in Boston and my Mom (who is not normally like this in public, or at all) took one look at me and him and burst into tears. I swear, she’d never hugged me so hard in my entire life and I was so tired that I couldn’t think of anything to do or say. We stood there hugging and crying and I could see BF’s consternation and jet lag warring for supremacy on his face. Fortunately, my Dad was awesomely relaxed and introduced himself. I finally got my brain working again and said something like, “Mom, we’re scaring the menfolk.” She calmed down considerably after that. My BF dealt with everything after that well, and I can’t blame him for freaking out. His calm later led to my Mom’s total approval.