Christmas: you realise you have nothing in common with family

[greencurds]

I’ve been trying to make sure I keep in touch with both sides of my family. I’ve never seen much of my dad’s family. We see each other at Christmas and maybe once each summer.

I grew up in Hong Kong (ex pat) and have lived in Cambridge for university and London for the rest of my life. Work in the city. Travel a lot.

Drove up to Lancashire to go to a Christmas party at an uncle’s house. I could not have felt more out of place, despite being closely related. They genuinely treat me like I am an alien, despite being welcoming etc. They drink beer or neat smart price gin. They made an effort to buy some £4 wine for me. The football was on the tv and most of the conversation was related to work complaints of having to work 35 hours a week… I add this, because our lives and experiences are so so different we genuinely have nothing in common other than sharing ancestors.

I said fewer. I was born in lancashire and lived there for 20 years. I am describing the town I grew up in. I am still in regular contact with almost all of my high school classmates. I would say 80% have never left the town and most view London as being glamorous and full of riches, as I did myself until I lived there for 20 years.

Wonder which one you are from because it sounds like another planet compared to the one I'm from

I don't speak the same languages as any of my cousins on that side (dad's siblings' children), so it's literally all charades all the time on the rare occasions we all get together. So it's all relative, innit (see what I did there)?
It's really not particularly unusual not to feel close to people you see, at most, twice a year, on occasions when lots of other things are going on.

‘They made an effort to buy some £4 wine for me.’
‘I took 3 bottles of £12 wine and some treats which were swiftly hidden away.’

So everyone bought wine, including you. But theirs wasn’t good enough, and yours was not meant as a gift??
This seems to be a crucial part of the tale of why you don’t like your ancestor-sharers for some reason.
Easy, obvious solution is to not bother seeing them. 🤷🏻‍♀️
(Edited because I mis-read the wine prices. Quelle horror)

You can be very different from people d still love and value them.
However if you feel little connection and don’t enjoy being with them then I would wonder why you bother with them. You don’t HAVE to see people just because they are related to you. Many people distance from relatives because seeing people for the sake of it is awful. Better to spend your time with people you love and value.

As an aside - the comment about smart price wine sounds judgemental. What was the point of that? To show you are a different class? Just seemed an odd comment. Or do you feel it means they don’t value you?

Just outside Bury. It was once a thriving Town with a lovely Market, a brilliant pun crawl and loafs of shops. In the 80s you could walk out of one job and start another next day. Now all the mills have closed, the market is long gone, there are only a handful of the 20 pubs left. It has a huge drug and crime problem and the town hall is now a hallway house for released prisoners. I loved growing up there. It makes me sad going back. Many of the people who live there are stuck in a poverty trap.

*pub crawl.

I don't go back and look down on people but am very aware that I have had a lot more life experiences and travelled much more than the majority of my peers.

OP, I’m from London too and your
Lancashire ancestors sound very depressing to spend more than 5 mins, send them a Christmas card and find a less depressing way to spend your Christmas Day.

@Dartmoorcheffy Radcliffe?

Re £4 wine, where on earth sells that?!

Aldi. Well, you can get a very nice bottle for £3.99

This.

You clearly have had a massively different background, upbringing and live a very different life from them now. Why would you have particular conversation in common?
Reads to me like they were kind enough to invite you (probably thinking it must be difficult to be so far from home and family at Christmas) and also went to the trouble of getting in drink they don't usually drink, but they thought you would. Why not put yourself out a bit and throw yourself in to whatever their traditions are.

I do have some sympathy with the OP. Some parts of my family from small town Yorkshire think I’m a terrible snob just because I went to university (the first one in the family) and dared to step out of our working class town. There can be some real inverse snobbery happening in these places.

So long as your intentions are good towards each other, none of this matters.

It's such a shame that social calls can divide us toxso great an extent isn't it.

Sounds like you haven't spent much of your life mixing with people from a wide variety of backgrounds and that you only mix with the privileged type - which I'm guessing this branch of your family are not! Maybe time to broaden your horizons and to remember your roots!

I get what you’re saying OP; there is dreadful poverty in some towns in that area. My DF is from a particularly down at heel seaside town in Lancashire and the inverse snobbery there is quite astounding. My DGF’s friends in the pub used to tease him about his fancy sons who’d swanned off to university and moved down south/abroad.

However, it does not sound like this is the case at all. Your relatives are being welcoming, and you’re showing exactly what you think of them by looking down on how they choose to live their lives. That’s not ok.

I live in a small town in Lancashire, quite run down and with plenty of anti social behaviour and poverty.
I like nice wine (although can drink beer if that's all the host has available) and can manage to converse quite adequately with people who made it all the way to uni, I didn't go myself though.
It seems like your family are in a race to the bottom and you are in a race to the top.
You look down on their lack of social graces and they think you are a London toff visiting the poor side of the family, you really should save yourself the bother of visiting them!

Yup

@Dartmoorcheffy Radcliffe market is now a thriving foodie place.
I think it's about to get a new high school and there is a regeneration budget for the centre.

That's brilliant. I still can't believe they demolished Coney (my old school) . Really good to hear there is improvement as I last visited about 5 years ago just after my mum died and it was just so depressing to see all my childhood ajd teenage memories boarded up.

I used to love going to see the outside nativity scene at St Mary's Church opposite the festival gardens and I was so shocked to see the church has even been demolished!

This is the second thread tonight where wine at 4 pound a bottle has been discussed.

If you are a Hong Konger, now you don't need to worry about what to do during Christmas!!
Here's a pack of games that is suitable for the whole family to play during Christmas! Especially if you have kids hehe
Save this and thank me later : www.twinkl.com.hk/resource/hong-kong-christmas-resource-pack-2024-hk-e-1732272806