Christmas unpopular opinions.

[malificent7]

I love my Bayliss and Harding gift sets and if you dont like yours send them to meeee!
Any other different festive unpopular opinions?

@purpleme12

Why do people not like them?

My theory is that the people who hate Baylis and Harding are fans of the more expensive Molton Brown.

The fact that B&H use very similar packaging/ font etc. to MB highlights that you can very easily dress up almost any product to make it look expensive.

You don’t need a starter with Christmas dinner.
Baileys is grim.
Christmas pudding, Christmas cake and mince pies are all pretty gross.
Adults deserve gifts, and they deserve the gifts they want, not what you think they should want - so don’t give scarves or candles to people who would rather have a book.
Cheap chocolate is nicer - it’s the milk and sugar that makes it taste good. (I fully expect to be lynched for this one.)
The Gavin and Stacey Christmas special is not funny and neither Gavin nor Stacey have any personality at all.
I like to spoil my children at Christmas. They generally save up for stuff they want with their own money. Christmas is a time to let them have stuff. We save and spread the cost.
Christmas is a season not just a day, so you don’t need to see all your extended family on Christmas Day. Our family are very scattered so we’d never manage doing that if we did.
Carols are the best sort of Christmas music, and the best sort of carol has something of midnight, snow and firelight about it.

Goodness, I have quite a lot!

I think all toiletries are fairly boring (unless requested particular brands) so Bayliss and Harding wouldn't offend me more or less than any others.
Thornton on the other hand are quite horrible.

I like bread sauce.

I like spending time with family

I don't mind "useful" presents in fact sometimes I ask for them

I'd do away with presents really! I do see that lots of children and young people NEED certain items as they don't have the money to buy them themselves, but surely they've got their birthday for that, or it might be something they need at a different time of year anyway. I really think it's pointless everybody receiving multiple presents from multiple people on one particular day of the year. It sends the cost of Christmas way high and makes some people go into debt, makes kids overexcited and some of them not appreciative, creates mess and waste with wrapping paper, causes extra stress buying it all for everyone when there's enough else to do, you often end up with items that aren't your taste/don''t fit etc from people who don't know you well etc etc on and on.

I don't think it's the whole point of Christmas. If you want to give, give to people who have nothing, or very little instead.

I dislike chocolate, Brussels sprouts, Christmas pudding , mince pies and I hate parsnips, salmon, bread sauce. We have turkey weekly so its a bit boring for Christmas. So we had a beef chateaubriand with red cabbage and carrots follwed by tiarimisu for dessert.

I hate Bayliss & Harding. Total waste. I can't even regift it, so it will be off to the charity shop on Wednesday 😂

Gift bags are naff, I'd rather see a badly wrapped present that a gift bag sealed with sellotape and don't get me started on presents in a gift bag with a crumpled bit of tissue over it or even worse a wrapped present inside a gift bag.

It's OK to enjoy a quiet Christmas day and let the kids stay in their pyjamas and not have visitors, I've never left the house other than to walk the dog on Christmas day, even when I was single and had no kids I loved having the day at home.
I see relatives and friends on other days around Christmas and have never made a fuss about it.
Last year there when we were locked down there were so many posts from people who'd really enjoyed their first quiet, relaxed, small Christmas with their partners and kids without all the stress and I wonder how many have gone back to hosting people when they don't want to or dragged the kids out to visit people yesterday because of a sense of obligation.

I've always wanted a really nice upright hoover for my birthday or christmas as I like hoovering. I've never been given one

I enjoy going to my IL as much as staying in by ourselves or seeing my side of the family.

December 25th is the first day of Christmas not the last. Tree and decs go up a few days before 25th and stay up til 12th night. I promise the whole thing makes much more sense when you start with a bang on blow-out-and-presents day then dwindle gently down over the following days, than spending a month building up to one big day and then crashing straight to it being all over.

Christmas dinner is just a roast with crackers.
Christmas cards are wonderful.
Bayliss and Harding is no different to Molton Brown.
People need to get over themselves if they have to make a drama out of everything.

@drpet49

Roast dinner is overrated and not special

You’re mad! They are the best 😂

@DreamerSeven

I bloody love sprouts, would have them with every Sunday roast if the rest of my family felt the same

@DreamerSeven

My husband has them every sunday - I buy a bag of frozen from supermarket and put a few in the microwave - you have to experiment a bit with the timings to get them right, depending on how you like them cooked

I also have no idea why dinner has to be so stressful just because it's Christmas. My mother used to be in the kitchen all day Christmas Eve and then again all Christmas morning, having those screaming abdabs as previously mentioned, and making the day bloody miserable for everyone. Then there would be the biggest fuss about who sat where ....unbelievable.

I can cook a roast dinner in a couple of hours, an hour of which is spent outside talking to the others. What Mum was doing for all that time, I'll never know.

@QueenofDestruction

I dislike chocolate, Brussels sprouts, Christmas pudding , mince pies and I hate parsnips, salmon, bread sauce. We have turkey weekly so its a bit boring for Christmas. So we had a beef chateaubriand with red cabbage and carrots follwed by tiarimisu for dessert.

You have turkey weekly?! Do you live on a turkey farm?

I love Christmas, I love seeing the faces of my kids on Christmas morning when they open their gifts….

But…

My popular opinion is -

I think people should just keep their own money and use it to buy presents for their own children, instead of us buying for friends and then buying for us and each family randomly picking what we think they’d like.

The problem is, it’s expensive enough trying to buy all of the their gifts so it makes sense for each family to just buy their own. (Unless each family knows what the other family wants so buys certain gifts but then what’s the point, just cut out the middle man 😂)

Also, when they get to teenagers, I found DC to become really fussy and was very specific and wouldn’t wear anything she hadn’t approved. So I wish grandparents would ask what dc would like and not just guess ad they even yo it’s wasting their money.

Just being honest….

as they end up wasting their money

@DukkaTheHallsWithBoughsOfHolly

A second meat is not required and Yorkshire puddings have no place with a Christmas Dinner unless you are having beef.

My unpopular opinion is that no one else should give a toss what anyone else eats, and I will have Yorkshires because we all like them, even with turkey. And that anyone who thinks otherwise should really just get over it.

I also tell DH what I would like for Christmas because I don’t like surprises and would rather get what I want rather than have people guess then start threads moaning about what I received.

@DukkaTheHallsWithBoughsOfHolly

Agree with everyone you just said

We had lamb with Bisto gravy Yorkshire puddings and stuffing - because we like it!

I also knew what my present was, because I told my DH what I wanted too

I don’t get the hatred for Bayliss and Harding. We’ve got all sorts of random hand wash in the house from boots own to Molton brown. It’s all basically soap at the end of the day. I like the expensive stuff as an occasional treat but am under no illusion that packaging and branding is the thing that adds to the cost price. H

@ShippingNews

I also have no idea why dinner has to be so stressful just because it's Christmas. My mother used to be in the kitchen all day Christmas Eve and then again all Christmas morning, having those screaming abdabs as previously mentioned, and making the day bloody miserable for everyone. Then there would be the biggest fuss about who sat where ....unbelievable.

I can cook a roast dinner in a couple of hours, an hour of which is spent outside talking to the others. What Mum was doing for all that time, I'll never know.

Probably making home made everything? Home made bread sauce, home made fancy starters, making veggies "special" with added this or that to make it different from usual Sundays, whipping cream for a home made trifle? I prefer the taste of home made everyhing at Christmas but haven't got the time to do it all, even in advance, without getting stressed. So what's the point in burdening yourself like that? We buy lots in, such as nice starters and desserts from M&S. I don't make my own pigs in blankets, or stuffing. I don't dress the turkey, I buy a turkey crown pre dressed. The only "different" veg I'll serve is red cabbage, and carrot & turnip, pre done and microwaveable from M&S, haven't got time to start faffing making that myself, and not everyone eats it anyway. We only have roast potatoes (home made), I don't understand people thinking it's essential to have mash and boiled as well, and I don't bother drizzling anything on parsnips, sprouts etc.

I do insist on home made gravy and if there's loads of us I top it up by buying ready made fresh gravy and adding a bit of bisto too.

If you think about Christmas dinner in the 70s and 80s it certainly was more of a faff now, and probably less expectation for men to help with it too. No wonder women were in the kitchen having a little stress cry!

My hatred for B&H is that I used to get the gift sets from my SIL who expected back Jo Malone candles or perfume as she had to have gifts with ‘names’.

So I would get the £3 gift set and yet expected everyone else to spend £80 on a candle. Fuck that shit.

I don't understand the need to cook everything the night before either. Surely you're then just stuck in the kitchen twice?! And turkey cooked the day before and reheated ends up dry.....

@OooPourUsACupLove

December 25th is the first day of Christmas not the last. Tree and decs go up a few days before 25th and stay up til 12th night. I promise the whole thing makes much more sense when you start with a bang on blow-out-and-presents day then dwindle gently down over the following days, than spending a month building up to one big day and then crashing straight to it being all over.

Yes, this. And here we celebrate Oíche Nollaig na mBan (Women’s Christmas) on Jan 6th/Epiphany, which is a nice finale.

I’m also with the minority who think it’s fine not to do ‘Santa is literally real’ with your children — it doesn’t diminish any of the ‘magic’ unless you’re the kind of adult who needs your children to put on a particular kind of performance of innocence for you.

In fact, the annual vituperative threads about this are one of the things that make me realise how many Mners must live in completely mono-cultural, mono-ethnic places, because one of the things that meant this was never an issue in our house is that, although DS (9) has been at three schools in two countries, he’s always had significant numbers of classmates from religious, cultural or ethnic backgrounds that either didn’t do Christmas at all, or had entirely different traditions about who brought what, so he grew up used to the idea that ‘some people believe X’.

My whole family look forward to Christmas dinner at our house - they say it is the meal of the year. Frankly I find my overpriced turkey from the butchers dry and dull but it does look spectacular.

This is the independent butchers (very MN) that messes up my order every year. I always have to ask them if they have put something in I have ordered and they never have. I am so confused that I do not know if I have been overcharged. Just buy from M and S fgs. I know we are supposed to support local, but if they cannot be arsed (4th year running) why should I.

Again, lovely Dd bought me eye wateringly expensive bath product, vegan and made locally. It smells of nothing. It is a sniffy local shop where staff have so many rules and regs that I am permanently confused. Another place to give a bit fat miss (lake district). Buy radox. No doubt I will be told they employ cruel practices.

Every year I say I'm absolutely happy to not receive any presents. Nobody ever listens though!
I'm grateful for anything I do get though & wouldn't dream of telling someone I didn't like their gift, that's entitled, rude & extremely unkind.
Also I hate Fairytale of New York, overplayed & reminds me of fraught, hot shopping trips with toddlers!
The worst Christmas song is The Carpenters' one though, so depressing!