This year will be my DH's and my first Christmas after having our lovely baby. In previous years we've done Christmas separately - I've gone to my parents, he has gone to his (a bit unusual but it's worked well for us!). This year, we obviously both want to be together with our daughter. So in order to avoid choosing between our families, we have decided to offer to host it at our house.
My family are delighted with this. The issue is my DMiL is clearly very unhappy with the situation, and it's stressing me out.
DMiL is a lovely person and we both make an effort to get on well with each other, despite some differences of opinion in some areas. She is a SAHM/homemaker with a wealthy husband (DFiL) and a lovely big house in the countryside with dogs and land surrounding it etc and she makes a big deal about how busy and exhausting and dangerous London is whenever she visits. My DH and I both work (though DH is on paternity leave at the moment) and have a non-fancy but perfectly nice small house in an area of London that we think is lovely but is definitely a far cry from the ILs' country shire.
When we said to DPiLs that my family were coming over for Christmas and they were welcome to join too, her first reaction was "YOU CAN'T!" and then seeing my face started raising objections like our dining table isn't big enough (we have another we can put on the end and there's plenty of space), our kitchen and oven aren't big enough to prepare a Christmas dinner (not true), it will be too much work with the baby, etc.
TBH I was planning on getting quite a bit of food in pre-prepared (canapes etc) and my mum and dad and my DSis and her boyfriend have already said they are happy to contribute dishes, so it had occurred to me that my and DH might not want to prepare the entire meal from scratch on Xmas morning. But we are perfectly capable of putting together a nice meal and have had guests over for Sunday lunch on other occasions without major incident.
Since mentioning it, the ILs haven't confirmed whether they will be coming (not an issue in itself as obviously there's plenty of time) but my MiL keeps calling my DH to say stuff like either we need to get my parents (who live nearby) to cook the turkey and bring it over or we should not do turkey etc.
I'm now realising that every time they come over to see our baby (they didn't visit us before we had the baby), she brings lunch for everyone, despite assurances that she doesn't need to. I thought it was a nice gesture but now I think it's because she doesn't want to eat our food! (She is a bit phobic about food and every meal involves exclamations about how much there is to eat and how unhealthy it is, but that's another story).
I am just feeling quite grumpy about the whole thing and wish I could uninvite the PILs (obviously I won't). I have suggested that they don't come and instead we go to them on Boxing day but tbh now I don't even want to do that, as I just don't like the feeling that they think they are providing us with a "proper" Christmas (though again, I won't pull out of the offer).
AIBU to think that it's not actually that shocking that DH and I would want to do Christmas as a family, even if I'm not really the home-maker type or an accomplished cook, and even if the alternative on offer is the ILs hosting at their posh and fancy house. I never thought I'd be one of those people with MiL rivalry. I'm usually hugely unbothered about what people think of my home-making skills. Really want to feel zen about this and don't want it to overshadow Xmas.
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Christmas AIBU
91 replies
mauvaisereputation · 16/10/2019 12:50
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