Christmas Drama

[smurfalicious]

So my mom called the other day. She wants to fly me home for Christmas. Please excuse my utter lack of enthusiasm.

I don't want to go home. To make matters worse we're apparently having Christmas at my little brother's place with his perfect little family and his wonderful job and blah blah blah. My mom puts my brothers on a pedestal and makes me feel like crap. I've told her I can't really get the time off being so new in my job but that's not working. I can't tell if she feels guilty or is sincere. So yeah I feel like butt right now. I'd rather just buy myself a trainer, or a BMX bike and call it good. My family doesn't get my hobbies and I'd rather just opt out and treat myself to something. And, mom has a new girlfriend I don't even know and meeting her at Christmas has zero appeal.

Meh, I used to love Christmas but every year it sucks more and more. My older brother owns his house and has a great girlfriend and a great job, little brother is married with a kid and is a sheriff's deputy, and there's me who got engaged to a guy they all hated and got cheated on. Go me!

Second problem, since I probably can't get out of gifts. My brothers are both involved as I mentioned and I end up buying gifts for my brother and their SO and I get an "us" gift. Sucks for me because it ain't cheap buying them all gifts. What is the proper etiquette here? Can I do the same? Nice household gift for my married brother, maybe a restaurant gift certificate for my older bro and his girlfriend?

Baaaah friggin humbug! I just want someone who loves me this much, in zebra please: http://www.intensebmx.com/racebikes/IBK9RPX-1.html

Love and Cookies!
-HillBill
The Grinch Who Hates Christmas

[Irulan]

Do what feels right for you. I think a huge amount of energy gets eaten up by expectations and obligations. We ( our family, DH and I ) absolutely refuse to get sucked into the spending thing for even our kids. We have very small, non commercial holidays. Sometimes we order pizza. We quit traveling hundreds of miles very early on - just won't do it.

IMSHO, nothing wrong with not buying gifts you can't afford, or just getting what is in your budget. It's not a freaking contest with a winner. IF your family thinks it IS a contest, you are better off without them.

I find I enjoy family visits so much more when it's other times of the years.

[shootingstar]

Your mom probably does genuinely wants all her brood together for Christmas. It's normal..for alot of parents. However you won't be able to resolve stuff in 1 visit with her.

Instead of mother spending money on your plane ticket, tell her to save some of it for a birthday gift for you next year.

Sounds like if you visited each of your brothers individually, things aren't too bad without your mother around to make comparisons? Which is what you might choose to do next visit. Have meaningful visits with each family member separately first.

I miss having Christmas with my immediate family and 5 siblings with their families. No, my family is not perfect either. I have learned that when one lives a plane flight away (3 hrs. long), it can /will take several years to resolve the underlying bigger stuff. Alot of it just can't be done by phone. Since it is costly to fly, I see them once a year or less. But now I haven't seen them for 18 months.

Sounds like your gift ideas are quite good. No need to apologize for being underbudget. You need to do gift-giving within your budget. You also are creative with your photography. Could always add something that you produced.

[snapdragen]

Gifts to "them" rather than separately are perfectly acceptable. You could take it a step further and make a donation in their names to their local food bank or some other charity. I started doing this last year, it works out wonderfully.

[planetluvver]

I sympathize with you. My advice is to do whatever you want to do. It is crazy to try to please family members who won't be pleased with us anyway. Besides, do they really need to know that you bought yourself a bike?

I heard some great advice one time about getting into debt for the holidays, but I wish I could credit the source. He said that we need to think whether the person we are gifting would WANT us to buy something that we couldn't afford. And if they would still want the present, knowing that it will cause us hardship, then is this person really someone who cares about us?

DISCLAIMER: I am such a humbug at Christmas. I go shopping on Christmas Eve for little indulgences for myself, and I inwardly am smug at all the stressed out, grumpy people needing that last little 'thing' to get the holiday right. I just want to tell them, "Go home! Put your feet up! And RELAX! It's supposed to be a HOLIDAY!"

[shootingstar]

Interesting about how gift-giving is dealt with in different families. I recall when I was a teenager, being totally shocked by a close friend of mine same age, who spent several hundred dollars per person on Christmas gifts. She came from a middle-class family and held down a part-time waitressing job.

I don't think I will ever get to the point of giving to charity via immediate family member's name for Christmases. I do like giving SOMETHING to each person.

In past years, if there were times I didn't have enough money or I was feeling especially creative I did make something for each family member. This is perfectly acceptable in my family...as long as one treats other person "equitably". meaning if I plan to save money by making gifts or spending less money, then I give equally inexpensive gifts to each person. If I spend money on each sibling, it is generally approx. $30.00-$35.00 per person. Believe or not, one can get some interesting/useful gifts. It just takes abit of time. I do my Christmas shopping over several months. (Do also remember, there's also the individual birthday gift-giving. So in a big family, that adds up.)

That generally has been the unspoken standard in our family. The only exception..is that we each tend to give more to our parents....they did spend enough money and effort raising each of us at least the lst 21 years of our lives.

My father just has a govn't pension (he was a restaurant cook) and my mother never worked outside home. I write cheques...they no longer want things to clutter their home. They are at a stage, where they are slowly giving away things to their adult kids now. (And it's better when it's a big family. Avoids family feuds later on.)

[snapdragen]

Oh, I still give them smaller gifts, nothing elaborate. It was actually my SIL who suggested I donate to the food bank in her name, I just expanded it to the rest of the tribe.

[smurfalicious]

Thanks ladies. I know I don't want to go home. Really, I can't. To go home for under a cajillion dollars would require nearly a week or more off. I just keep hoping someone is going to say something that will make me feel less like crap for not wanting to go.

It seems so wrong to say "Don't get me anything because I'm opting out this year," because if I buy a BMX bike karma predicts that I will wreck bad and have some 'splainin to do! I know my mom has probably already bought me stuff, ugh. Last years gift was pretty amazing so honestly, don't need much. The things I want I'm not comfortable asking for. "Please to put money in savings account number XXXXXX for to purchase shiny shiny Colnago CX-1."

I really don't even know what to get people. I feel so detached from them. It's not like they've made any noble efforts to stay in touch, but complain that I'm not calling them all the time. It's like I dropped off the face of the earth. Then again, my family has always stayed pretty centralized so I broke the mold moving 1200 miles away.

I just want to tell them that I feel more comfortable right now celebrating with my tribe out here that saw me through hell and back in the last year. They see family in black and white, to me family is people who love you and care about you. Doubt they could ever understand.

[shootingstar]

I really don't even know what to get people. I feel so detached from them. It's not like they've made any noble efforts to stay in touch, but complain that I'm not calling them all the time. It's like I dropped off the face of the earth. Then again, my family has always stayed pretty centralized so I broke the mold moving 1200 miles away.

I just want to tell them that I feel more comfortable right now celebrating with my tribe out here that saw me through hell and back in the last year. They see family in black and white, to me family is people who love you and care about you. Doubt they could ever understand.

You don't have to tell your family that your friends are closer than your family. That actually can be quite hurtful and you may regret this not now..but in a few ...decades.

And I'm from a family where I get uh...an email from someone every few months or a phone call. When we all lived in same city, I had communication from a family member maybe every 1-3 wks. This type of frequency doesn't mean we don't love each other or don't care, ..we just aren't keeping tabs on each other so tightly because we have our own lives.

For the longest time, I used think my mother was abit nuts when she was happy when ie. 2 of her daughters would go on a vacation together or whatever. Now I realize...that's one of the reasons why she and Dad chose to have more than 1 child....to give us companions for life.

It's taken us a LONG time smurf, for our family to get to where we are now....after riproarin' arguments, tears,etc. We are closer ..and abit kinder to each other.

[lph]

aaaahhhh - families are difficult, Christmas is difficult. It helps if you have a feeling for what the rest of the family really feels about Christmas. I've realized that even though I don't want to have those expectations (it's just a few days in December, for crying out loud! How about the rest of the year! ) I do still have the feeling that I should spend those days with my family and at peace with them. Which is a pretty tall order considering that I come from an extremely individualistic family where everybody spins off like their own little satellite doing what they feel like the rest of the year. So I try to see everybody, but I no longer feel any need to gather everybody at once.

Yes, you should do what you feel, but if everybody does that chances are somebody is unhappy. If this really is important to your mother and your siblings, you might want to join them just to make them happy. If you can avoid hurt feelings by a few thoughtful gifts (no, they most definitely don't have to be expensive) and telling them you'd rather come see them later, do so.

No matter how you choose to deal with it, you're stuck with your family for the rest of your life - or their lives, which was brought forcibly to my attention when I lost my brother a few years ago. We were not close, which in fact made it worse, in some ways, because we had never been, and now, could never be "companions for life", as shootingstar eloquently out it. I spent a lot of time mourning the loss of the "companion for life" I'd never had. I'm not saying you should go on down and pretend to be closer than you are, just that it's not surprising at all if you feel that the connection to your family is more complicated than to your friends, and you may find out at some point that the connection is stronger than you thought.

-longwindedly yrs, lph

[uforgot]

Here's what helped me. Do you have health insurance? Go talk to a counselor. A lifelong comparison to a favored sibling can do a lot of damage and you don't even know it. They see things we aren't even aware of. It can only help as you are obviously struggling with this. You may think it's overkill, but it can only help.

I"ll be thinking of you and let us know how it goes.

[OakLeaf]

Aw Smurf, I so hear you.

We're lucky that the financial end of it isn't an issue, but it takes me weeks or months to recover emotionally from those holiday visits. They've been rare, but my dad is in very poor health and my F-I-L is 92 years old, so the obligation to visit while we can is piling up.

I don't have any good advice... just empathy. (((((Smurf)))))

[Pax]

My SO and I opted out of Christmas a few years ago, we got a great rate on a gorgeous room in downtown Chicago and spent four days going from hot tub to pool to sauna, and then out to eat...it was heavenly!

It was also incredibly hard to explain and to deal with family so I definitely feel for you.

[pardes]

What I would do is think about what the concept of Christmas means to me and separate it from what is has become - an often forced, miserable, expensive excuse for families to pretend that are living a perfect life.

You are an adult now and can decide what you want your family to mean to you and what you want to mean to your family. There is a lot of personal responsibility attached to that. Sometimes it means continually trying to fix communication problems and sometimes it means needing to separate from them. It all depends on how toxic the situation is.

Some people abide by the directive to "honor our parents." That means honor them in spite of their shortcomings that all of us have. However, it does not mean we are required to subject ourselves to all the emotional fallout.

Give yourself a Christmas present, the right to be yourself within the context of a difficult family.

My family situation was toxic and I had to separate myself from them for decades. I took care of my mother at the time of her death. No one else came. In the last days and hours of her life, going in and out of consciousness, she only wanted to hold my hand and continually say, "I love you. Forgive me."

No forgiveness is needed (to ask be asked for or granted) and love is always there waiting to bloom again when we honor the light within ourselves and the light within others. Celebrate the light of Christmas.

[uforgot]

Well said Pardes.