Holiday Politics

Came across the following while websurfing. The website is one of those "large-family-lots-of-kids" type and this was one of the responses to an article concerning family holidays:

Every year since the day he was born in 1989, my son has spent Christmas with his family. Son was married in June and informed me last night his wife scheduled them a two-week trip to Europe December 16 through 29 and I am very upset. I am divorced and don't have a partner in my life and my only family is my daughter and son and I think it's mean and selfish for my daughter in law to do this and son to agree. She's from a different culture and could care less about the holidays. My son in medical school and has a two week breather and said they would go away day after Christmas but wife wants him all to herself. How do I deal with this. She's been this way since she met my son and now they are married. It's their first Christmas together and it's all about them traveling. My daughter is going to be so upset as well . My parents and family are deceased and I only have my two kids. The holidays have always been a really big deal in the family - no more. Our family was always so close. I welcomed wife into family 3 years ago but she's not interested and makes no effort as she wants son all to herself and her mother and grandmother. I'm heartbroken I miss my son so much - rarely see him anymore and he lives 1.5 hours away.

Sure seems like this mom has way too much time on her hands, and her response literally screams "it's all about me!". However during this time of year it's a common theme among many families, large and small. It's almost like there's lots of unspoken taboos being broken here. Many articles that I see mention the logistics of holiday travel to respective inlaws so that they can see grandkids as well as the ensuing guilt-trips. But what about the CF? Say like you wish to spend time alone on a major holiday that the rest of the family holds near-and-dear? What if you just want to spend time with a significant other during a major holiday without seeing either sets of parents/family.. what if you're an only child and just want some "me" time away from family during the holidays?. Potentially explosive situation.. Bratfree readers...??

Good on the wife for not doing something the first year that she's not prepared to do the rest of the marriage. Might as well establish the routine right away. And isn't the point of raising kyds to have them grow up? If he doesn't want to come home for Christmas, he's a grown man!

I go to DH's family's for a few days at Christmas every year. Gawd knows he does a lot for my mom all year, and his parents are still alive and I don't mind going (because I insisted early on that we stay in a hotel) and I like the town. But BELIEVE ME, I'm already jockeying to change things after they are gone. I want us to stay together and have OUR OWN holiday and I've earned it.

Traveling at the holidays is super sucky anyway and when you have a fucking job (something my evil SIL can't quite comprehend) and limited vacation, it's such a hassle. Add the whole annoying Jesus-y thing, and I'm ready to go to Hawaii or somewhere tropical.

My SIL is absolutely demented about the holidays. Actually all the in-laws are to some extent. GROWN PEOPLE with their spouses are known to cram themselves into my in-law's tiny house with ONE BATHROOM--good Gawd, this is not how grown people live. It's not unusual to have 20 people in the house with people sleeping on blow up beds and couches. no privacy. We were the first to defect to a hotel and I'm glad the other kids are following suit, much to my SIL's dismay. (Control freak.)

My SIL doesn't live in the town anymore, and one year my SIL's kid, who is one of those spayshul snowflake Millenials who still lives at home rent-free and she's 30+, was going to get stuck in some kind of airport delay. My SIL broke down, crying, practically hyper-ventilating that OMG Snotleigh might miss the mass present opening, where we do a Dirty Santa and exchange gifts not worth over $20.

I remember just looking at her and thinking, WTF is wrong with you? Your damn kid lives at home....so what if you don't see her that particular day......Earth will hardly fall off its axis.

In short, I don't get the whole OMG IT'S FAMBILEE AND FAMBILEE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD AND YOU MUST BE TOGETHER AT THE HELLIDAZE!

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It's not unusual to have 20 people in the house with people sleeping on blow up beds and couches. no privacy.

That sounds to me like being in prison!

As far as I am concerned, I am the grinch who h8tes the Christmas, exactly for the reasons mentioned above.
You HAVE TO spend time with fambly, you HAVE TO buy presents. You HAVE TO be prepared for Christmas -
i.e. buy tons of foods, bake tons of cookies and clean the house. Hours of drudgery. When your fambly is not around, you HAVE TO travel.

The result is - you waste your time and money, gain weight and will end up stressed out.
You will need a holiday to recover after such Christmas.
I don't see anything magical about Christmas. When there is something magical, please correct me.

If something means a lot to someone I care about, and I know, I will try to accommodate. Of course my relatives are not the type to make passive-aggressive remarks, attempt guilt trips, or expect too much. It would be a simple: "It would mean a lot to me if you could attend." And if I couldn't attend, that would be the end of it.

This woman, on the other hand, acts like she's owed her son's company on a holiday. She fails to recognize that he is an adult and can choose how to spend his time. With all the drama it doesn't sound as if she makes the experience a pleasant one; it probably turned in to an unpleasant obligation for him long before he got married. If it really was a pleasurable experience involving people who spend time together because they want to, his wife would anticipate attending as well. I'm not surprised she has no interest in being "welcomed into the family", which seems to mean kowtowing to the desires of the clan matriarch.

She needs to stop basing her own happiness on other people. Not seeing a loved one - who lives reasonably close - on a particular holiday should result in a little disappointment, not cries of abandonment.

Does she have any friends or neighbors who could maybe invite them over to their Christmas and make her feel welcome? If she feels that bad, maybe the church can help? If she is feeling suicidal over this, maybe even go to the emergency room or hang around the local hospital cafeteria and talk to the health workers and have something to eat with them. Or am I making this out to be worse than it is?

Most people are on auto-pilot regarding a lot of community and family expectations.
They assume and require their own many expectations to be performed by people they know without any flexibility and consideration for the actual people involved.
None of this is as mandatory as people try to convey.

As this thread came up, my long-term boyfriend and I were discuss plans around Christmas time.
For decades, both of us minimally celebrate, picking and choosing which parts of tradition and family appeals to us.

We were specifically discussing two family members who are compulsive about family attendance and their expectations and two other family members who are quite frankly assholes.
I have been on the asshole -avoidance program for years and drew a firm line that if those two were at any event, I was leaving, but without making a scene.
Also, that the two compulsive "family first" people were going to have to be happy with me attending a few simple minimal events and that was it.

This woman needs to stop centering her life around her kids. She needs to go out and make some friends and not expect her grown-ass kids to provide 100% of her human interactions. She also needs to learn flexibility and stop making everything about her. From what it sounds like, Son and Wife have busy lives and haven't gotten much of a chance to spend ample time with each other in the roughly six months they've been married. If Son is in medical school, they might not have gone on a honeymoon. I don't blame Wife for wanting to have some alone time with the new spouse during the holidays. They just got married; this is an important time to build a solid foundation upon which the rest of their marriage will be based, especially if they're planning to have children. Moocow is not part of the marriage; just because she no longer has a partner doesn't mean her son needs to essentially sacrifice his for her.

Maybee Moocow should go up for a day prior to Son's vacation and do the holiday thing early with him and Wife (he lives 90 minutes away; that's not an insurmountable distance) and then spend the holiday proper with her daughter. Speaking of, I doubt the daughter is going to be that upset and if she is, she needs to get over it as well.

I'm glad the wife put her foot down on it just being the two of them for the holidays; it'll set a precedent that she and her husband will not kowtow to Moocow's expectations. She just needs to stay strong. Moocow is going to double down on her demands on Son and wife's time.


As an aside, this is the future of the cows who put their kids first, second, third, and everybody and everything else way the hell down at the bottom. They end up with no friends, no husband, and become the overbearing smother to her adult kids and their spouses because since she gave up her life for her kids, she feels that her kids have no right to have a separate life from her.

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- Garrett Hardin

"I feel like there's a message involved here somehow, but then I couldn't stop laughing at all the plotholes, like the part when North Korea has food."
- Youtube commentor referring to a North Korean cartoon.

"Reality is a bitch when it slowly crawls out of your vagina and shits in your lap."
- Reddit comment

"Bitch wants a baby, so we're gonna fuck now. #bareback"
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Oh whatever. Abortion doctors are crimestoppers."
- Miss Hannigan

For some reason I imagine moomie slithering in between her son and his wife in an effort of "you can't have him he's mine!". Kinda like how a dog will get between his person and whoever else is trying to hug his person. I pray these two don't have kids because if they think it's bad now, they haven't seen anything yet and 90 minutes away is going to be too close real soon.

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"It is better not to look like what you are; it is better to look like a bourgeois woman because then all the doors are open for you and then you can just go and make hell." - Marjane Satrapi

Also wanted to add that this line creeped me the way fuck out:

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I think it's mean and selfish for my daughter in law to do this and son to agree. She's from a different culture and could care less about the holidays. My son in medical school and has a two week breather and said they would go away day after Christmas but wife wants him all to herself

This screams way too close....selfish and almost incestuous obsessive. Hope whatever boyfriend/girlfriend she snags doesn't have any rabbits... or the son and daughter-in-law for that matter.

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"It is better not to look like what you are; it is better to look like a bourgeois woman because then all the doors are open for you and then you can just go and make hell." - Marjane Satrapi

Being an only child myself, there's that unspoken rule to visit the parents over the Christmas. I don't know whether I'd call it a "rule" per se, but that's how it's been for so many years. Out of all of these 27 years of living away from home I've only missed two Christmas. The first instance was when I had a new job, having just finished graduate school. They were kinda disappointed as my parents were even willing to help pay for the plane ticket. The second time was where I surprised them over Thanksgiving instead. They seemed to be Ok with that. Nowadays only my Mom is left, being that my Dad died about 10 years ago. So I try to visit her each year(she's 93). DH always stays at home. The last time he saw my parents was in 1987 while I was in grad school. They never liked him from the first meeting (as a result sadly the feelings are mutual)- and thus I've never invited them to my turf for fear of a very unpretty conflict . And neither his name nor existence are ever mentioned during phone calls, or while I visit them for reasons that I don't wish to discuss here. But gotta give my parents credit that they're not the type to make unannounced visits.

Anyhow, back to the topic at hand, here's another one from a different site - The OP is asking for advice because her son might not be coming home for Christmas as he's finally found a job. She says that they all go for a family ski trip and doesn't like the idea of a college student staying at school for the holidays (instead of visiting family). One of the answers on that thread shouts "bully" Yikes! :

I have older children. Coming home for Christmas isn't optional. I would play guilt or whatever else it took. There have been years when my oldest was only around for Christmas morning and Christmas dinner and then left after that, but he has been here. I bent on all sorts of things, but not that. The big family ski vacation may not be an option if he has to work, but I would strongly encourage, almost to the point of coersing, that as well. Sad experience has shown me that at least one family vacations ought not to be optional until the child has a family of their own. For my oldest, summers didn't work so we instituted a ski-after-Christmas vacation. We borrow a condo from a friend and fill it full of any of our sons' friends who want to come. We feed everyone. We go some place with an around-the-town shuttle bus so we don't have to worry about them driving around. It has been a totally different sort of vacation than our regular very close, can't get out of arm's reach of each other because we are all stuck on a boat sort of vacation. And it is expensive, unlike going sailing. But this way, we have a family vacation. It is priceless as far as family closeness goes and it has been a big factor in continuing to keep us all feeling like a family. You'll probably get lots of other people telling you to let go, etc., but as I said, in my experience, this is not a good idea. The years before we began doing the ski vacation when the rest of us went sailing for vacation were the ones when the family felt the most untogether. I know my sons value it, too, because the older two have been saying the last few Christmases that all they want for Christmas is to go skiing, before they go back to school they ask if we can please do it again, and they talk about it non-stop with the youngest and each other when they come home for Thanksgiving. This is very different than it was when my oldest was 19 and 20 and I had to twist his arm to get him to come see us Christmas day. Now, he doesn't even remember not wanting to come. Anyway, I vote that you make it a family rule that everyone has to come home for Christmas Day and the ski vacation.

Hugs. I know how upsetting the whole thing is.

Thread in question: http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/215277-not-coming-home-for-christmas/

I have a family member who flips out every year if things don't go exactly as she has concocted them in her mind. She puts all her happiness on the most flakey family member and is disappointed every year as he never fails to disappoint. Heaven forbid he hasn't called by 2 p.m. or is running late to arrive or decides at the last minute to not join them. Once I became an adult and moved away I no longer have to deal with her nonsense at the holidays. Prior to that I'd endured it since I was a kid. And heaven forbid she didn't receive a gift she was expecting and thought it may not have been purchased for her even though it was still under the tree unwrapped. Or the freak outs when the family didn't go along with everything she had planned in her mind and was late for anything or someone would rather socialize than help her in the kitchen all day. She thrives on drama.

It is possible to enjoy the holidays and decide nothing is going to prevent you from doing otherwise but it is also a personal decision to do so. Unhappy family members need to wake up and realize that happiness is a choice. I'd rather spend the holidays alone than have to endure someone else's unhappiness and annoying behavior.

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Most people are on auto-pilot regarding a lot of community and family expectations.

My DH is a go-along-get-along kind of guy and well, he's a guy. Lower to maintain in general. Our first Christmas together, I made the HUGE mistake of staying at his family's house during the holidays. We were not allowed to stay in the same room because we weren't married. And yes, we were 40+. I actually didn't have a problem with this although I thought it was pretty naive because of our age, but their house, their rules, and it's just another example of why making your own arrangements is a good idea.

Anyway, the second year I basically said, I'm not coming unless there's a hotel involved. DH stayed there for a couple of days and I flew down. He called me the day before I came down and he was like, "OMG, this place was small when all we kids lived in it, and now we are back in here and everyone has their kids and their pets, I can't wait until we can flee to the hotel." He just never thought about it until someone questioned the assumption that we all "had to" stay there.

Anyway, back to topic, as is typical, the deranged Moo is blaming the daughter in law. This is a common tactic of my SIL, to blame the wife and not the family member. I can just imagine what they say about me, but DH has got to make me happy and not them. But I obviously can't be saying/doing something too awful because the rest of the brothers and sisters stay at a hotel now too, except for the SIL who is pushing 60 and wants to be stuck up her parents' asses.

Back to topic, a lot of men hide behind their wives or vice versa when they really don't want to come. I know right now my sister is doing that. I'm taking care of my elderly mother and she is using her husband as an excuse, when she really just doesn't want to come.

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DucorpsToo
Being an only child myself, there's that unspoken rule to visit the parents over the Christmas. I don't know whether I'd call it a "rule" per se, but that's how it's been for so many years. Out of all of these 27 years of living away from home I've only missed two Christmas. The first instance was when I had a new job, having just finished graduate school. They were kinda disappointed as my parents were even willing to help pay for the plane ticket. The second time was where I surprised them over Thanksgiving instead. They seemed to be Ok with that. Nowadays only my Mom is left, being that my Dad died about 10 years ago. So I try to visit her each year(she's 93). DH always stays at home. The last time he saw my parents was in 1987 while I was in grad school. They never liked him from the first meeting (as a result sadly the feelings are mutual)- and thus I've never invited them to my turf for fear of a very unpretty conflict . And neither his name nor existence are ever mentioned during phone calls, or while I visit them for reasons that I don't wish to discuss here. But gotta give my parents credit that they're not the type to make unannounced visits.

Anyhow, back to the topic at hand, here's another one from a different site - The OP is asking for advice because her son might not be coming home for Christmas as he's finally found a job. She says that they all go for a family ski trip and doesn't like the idea of a college student staying at school for the holidays (instead of visiting family). One of the answers on that thread shouts "bully" Yikes! :

I have older children. Coming home for Christmas isn't optional. I would play guilt or whatever else it took. There have been years when my oldest was only around for Christmas morning and Christmas dinner and then left after that, but he has been here. I bent on all sorts of things, but not that. The big family ski vacation may not be an option if he has to work, but I would strongly encourage, almost to the point of coersing, that as well. Sad experience has shown me that at least one family vacations ought not to be optional until the child has a family of their own. For my oldest, summers didn't work so we instituted a ski-after-Christmas vacation. We borrow a condo from a friend and fill it full of any of our sons' friends who want to come. We feed everyone. We go some place with an around-the-town shuttle bus so we don't have to worry about them driving around. It has been a totally different sort of vacation than our regular very close, can't get out of arm's reach of each other because we are all stuck on a boat sort of vacation. And it is expensive, unlike going sailing. But this way, we have a family vacation. It is priceless as far as family closeness goes and it has been a big factor in continuing to keep us all feeling like a family. You'll probably get lots of other people telling you to let go, etc., but as I said, in my experience, this is not a good idea. The years before we began doing the ski vacation when the rest of us went sailing for vacation were the ones when the family felt the most untogether. I know my sons value it, too, because the older two have been saying the last few Christmases that all they want for Christmas is to go skiing, before they go back to school they ask if we can please do it again, and they talk about it non-stop with the youngest and each other when they come home for Thanksgiving. This is very different than it was when my oldest was 19 and 20 and I had to twist his arm to get him to come see us Christmas day. Now, he doesn't even remember not wanting to come. Anyway, I vote that you make it a family rule that everyone has to come home for Christmas Day and the ski vacation.

Hugs. I know how upsetting the whole thing is.

Thread in question: http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/215277-not-coming-home-for-christmas/

Regarding the second part of this post and the ski versus sailboat family holiday/vacation, all that went through my brain was:

OMG PUH-HUH-LEASE TELL ME MOAR OF YOUR FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS AND THEN GO DIE IN A FIRE!!!!!

This makes me so grateful that most of my relatives are very chill and respectful of boundaries.

However, I do have one relative who constantly feels the need to steer everything to religion and politics, and shove their extremely conservative views down everyone's throat. I try to avoid this person.

Also, not every Milennial is a spoiled lazy brat who lives at home 30+. I'm 24, 100% self-supporting and have taken shitty jobs to stay that way, and there's no way in hell I would ever even consider stunting my own independence and social live by moving in with my parents.

What a heap of crazy that was, DucorpsToo. She talks about obligatory and optional as if she's running a prison.

My parents didn't live near either of their parents, so we never went anywhere for the holidays. Instead, my parents filled the house with their friends. As an adult, I live quite far from my parents so I don't think they ever expected me be there for the holidays. About twice a decade I manage it, and have a nice time, but when I'm not there, they do what they always did: fill the house with their friends and have a nice time. Every time I read threads like this one I'm reminded of how sane my parents are, and how unfortunately rare it is.

Despite what the bully breeder may think, it's the fact that my parents have given me the space to be an adult that makes me close to them now. That closeness may not be measured in percentage of holidays spent in their house, or number of phone calls in a year, but in how frequently I feel appreciation for them as parents, and in how I treasure all the time I do spend with them - it is never a chore.

Here's an idea for the moo. How about she do something different this year? How about she go help people who are worse off than she is. Volunteer at a homeless shelter, animal shelter (Hey, the puppies and kitties need a lil' Christmas cheer too!), a nursing home , a group home, etc. My grandparents moved up north a few years ago, and the first Christmas in their new house there was a snowstorm and they weren't able to come down and visit us. So they went out and volunteered at a soup kitchen. That's something Moo could look into.
Or she can continue to sit on her ass and feel sorry for herself because it's all about her and her first world problems. To hell with those who might be ill or may have lost a loved one or are trying to keep from freezing to death on the streets, Mommy's baby boy isn't bringing her presents this year! Waaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!

Wow, that thing made me so grateful for the family I have. They're pretty chill and boundary-savvy. I know my mom and dad would love to see more of me, or better yet if I lived closer. But they also don't regard their entertainment and emotional well-being as their kids' responsibility. Frankly, for years and years travel was just not in the cards. We couldn't afford it. Job situations have VASTLY improved for both myself and my husband, so we're probably going to visit my family for either Christmas or Thanksgiving next year. But if they'd been selfish dicks about my absence, I would probably think twice about going to visit now, ya know?

The mother in the original post sounds like she's got some issues. She can't see it as anything but an affront to her. I can see why the son and his wife don't wanna be around her.