Dear Snarky,
Thank God, I’m finally home after spending Christmas at my sister-in-law’s house. It was a disaster. I’ve never met such a cliquey group of people before. Her entire family separated themselves from the rest of the guests the entire day. If everyone was in the family room they would be in living room. If you tried to mingle with them you would pretty much get ignored. It was unbelievably uncomfortable.
I told my husband I’m never subjecting myself to another Christmas day like that again and while he agreed with me that his brother’s wife relatives are F’ing nuts he told me we just had to deal with it because it’s family.
Umm, it’s not my family and his sister-in-law’s relatives are not his family so I think next year and the year after that etc we can just take a pass on Christmas with this bunch of cold fish.
What do you think Snarky I’m a right?
Signed,
Still Pissed
Dear Pissed,
The big old extended family get together is one of those things that sounds good in theory, (like buying your pants too small to encourage you to lose weight) but in reality it can be a hot mess (i.e. you now have no pants to wear). Sure it’s supposed to be all Hallmark Channel lovey dovey, but it never seems to work out that way.
And in your case you really were spending time with almost strangers. Not that there’s anything wrong with that if the strangers are open to becoming friends, but it seems your sister-in-law’s family wanted nothing to do with the co-mingling of kin.
That was a long way of me saying that I agree with 100%. Having to experience an awkward Christmas every year is no fun and who made your sister-in-law the Queen of the holidays? Another good questions is why do you have to have Christmas at her house every year? Wouldn’t it be more fair and, dare I say, more fun if it rotated?
I would suggest all this now while the memory of the crappy Christmas is still fresh in everyone’s mind and get some sort of action plan for next year and beyond in place.
Also, because families can have, shall we say, varied interpretations of the facts I would do this all via email so you have a “hard” copy of the discussion. This will serve as evidence so no one next December can pull a “What are you talking about I didn’t agree to this?” stunt. If and when this happens all you will need to do is share the time stamped and dated emails to shut them down.
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Snarky in the Suburbs 