Another Christmas frustration here to add to everyone else’s woes.
I have been laying awake for several hours stewing on this so will be be good to get some perspective.
My side of the family don’t do Christmas in a very jolly way, you come away terribly depressed wondering what the point of it all is, so we often visit at some point over the festive time but try to limit it to once every 5 years on the actual day to try to limit the children’s exposure to hearing about how many people have died this year.....
DH family enjoy Christmas. They do however have a bias towards his sister, favourites are not well concealed. They spend every year with his sister, despite her being married she has never spent it with his side of the family. So if we are to see DH family for Christmas it always is with her too.
Not so bad if all rub along nicely, except she is quite a princess and is now bringing up her own princesses which creates an even starker situation of favourites from his parents. They positively swoon at anything that comes out of the little darlings mouths whereas my children have to work for any attention. For example one of my children won a big award from school at the end of term and on proudly telling the grandparents of their award they were met with the response “lovely, darling cousin sang in the school choir this week, heavenly voice she has”.
DH brother ducked out of spending Christmas with everyone over a decade ago citing to us that he cannot stand the stark inequality and now spends every year with his in laws who he is close to. So they have lovely Christmases each year and his parents don’t even seem to notice his absence. Moaning a few times a year at how close sister in law is with her parents and how they don’t get a look in with their son.
We have tried various scenarios at Christmas, we have gone away at Christmas, spent it alone at home just our little family unit, but each time my husband craves to be with his family.
So I would average once every two years we have all spent it with DH parents, always with the sister and her family in tow.
Most of the time it has involved us hosting, although there has been one year the sister has hosted and a few his parents have.
All we would love however is just to spend Christmas with his parents, we have suggested this would be nice to his parents several times but that notion has been swept aside with a look as if we have mentioned something so absurd it didn’t warrant a response.
So each year we choose between being alone, seeing my depressing parents, or spending it with his parents with the princess sister and her brood.
Each year she will do something outrageous leaving us reeling in her wake and i can’t help but stew over it and whatever I do I cannot shake it
I truly despise Christmas, despite being brought up a Christian and having a high days and holidays relationship with it, I wish Christmas never existed. Each year brings with it the same frustrations, each year I vow we will do something different next year but each year it ends up with DH clinging on to wanting to see his parents and me not really offering up any alternative to float his boat or our children’s so back we go for more.
If only we could just spend it with his parents, just one year. I need the absence of being being able to do that does anyone have suggestions on how to deal with our collective family frustration?