Missing the noisy, chaotic Xmas's of my childhood

[Unglamorousgranny]

Not an AIBU but just voicing my thoughts. Anybody miss the Xmas's of the old days? When I was a child in the 70's nothing was open on Boxing Day & it was great. Instead it was a mad, chaotic day & long night round my grandparents & they loved it. Aunts, uncles, cousins, some great aunts, uncles & second cousins as well as us. Everyone used to sleep on the floor as not enough beds, plenty of "emergency chairs" as Peter Kay puts it. Now the older ones are all gone, my generation of the family are all spread out & got their own adult dc & dgc so it's too much to get together. Now the shops are rammed on Boxing Day & that extended family time seems to have disappeared. After a lot of illness this year I wouldn't even have the energy for it this year anyway. Trouble is cos of the adverts, celebs going on about having lots of family round to celebrate I get FOMO a lot! I'm grateful for who I have here on Xmas Day, (dh, ds, dm) & dd & her family in the morning. No plans Boxing Day. What went wrong, why has it all changed? Anybody else feel sad for the old days?

I absolutely loved a full house Christmas, had so much fun with my cousins. Not a fan of a quiet Christmas.

Exactly this. It was so boring being dragged from house to house to sit whilst the adults chatted. When we moved away from extended family, my grandparents came to stay one year and the whole dynamic changed again. My brother and I were told to go back to bed and weren't allowed to get up until 8 (we were 10 and 7) and my grandmother insisted that we all sit down and watch The Queen's Speech together. It was definitely less fun for us that year.

We live far from family now, so don't do any visiting since we stopped travelling to family at Christmas 7 years ago.

We like not having to please anyone but ourselves. We'll see family throughout the year.

I manage to sort of replicate this as my in laws live in the same city, when i go home my aunty hosts and there are most of my family there. Then another day we go to extended in laws. A lot of driving though as we incorporate wales, london and yorkshire!

I grew up in the 60s and extended family lived 200 miles away. No one came for Xmas and we never visited them.
Just the 4 of us plus granny.
Massive age gap between me and my sister ( 15 years) so I was the only child.

My dc would be so disappointed to not see relatives on Xmas. In fact they were very sad about it during the pandemic.
They do have cousins they get on with and 'fun' uncles who spoil them. I think that makes a difference.

I think it's sad too that so many kids are on screens even if families do get together. When my DC got together with their cousins when they were primary age or younger, they'd all play together and have fun. However, when my kids see their cousins now they are all teenagers, they ignore each other and look at their phones. I will try and drop hints and say to my DC, right come off your phones now but my in laws don't get the hint and do the same with their kids. When I was younger, even as teens, my cousin's and I would be having fun and getting up to mischief. It's so sad nowadays.

I hated having to be left with annoying and bullying cousins whilst the adults got drunk and told us to go and play. No way would I put my own kids through that.

We have loads of our own traditions based on things that have happened since they were little that they ask for now older. We do lots of visiting in the run up but Christmas Day and Boxing Day is for our immediate family only and it's fab.

Obligations to hang out with people you are related to (but can only manage in small doses) is definitely something I refuse to subscribe to 'because it's Christmas'

Boxing day would be at my grandparents (Christmas day always just us 4 at home). There would be my mum and her two sisters, then all four grandchildren, and great Aunty or great uncle so and so. One of my mum’s cousins sometimes “came through” to visit. My dad barely tolerated it, being an anti social introvert who had worked Christmas Day and didn’t even know what a cousin was, his family was so small.

My youngest cousin was born once all the other grandchildren were adults and an irreparable row had driven my mum’s generation apart. So he has never known a Christmas of more than three people. He lives in the house that hosted Christmas which to me feels very full of ghosts but is now very lonely.

I'm not prepared to host the Xmas of my youth.

My mum worked part time. Her mil & sil would arrive Chritmas eve ish and stay 4/5 days

My mum started moaning in October.

I'd be on a camp bed, the house was chaos. The stress of producing three meals a day, for a week. mum looking more and more frantic. My dad totally checked out of hosting.

But my mother does wonder why I'm not big on extended family Christmases.

I agree.

Grandparents, Aunties and Parents have all passed on. And my generation are all geographically spread, a number of them have to work over Christmas. So Cmas Day is a much smaller affair than when I was a kid. I still love it. But I look back on those childhood Christmases with real nostalgia.

It's so easy to look back at the past and think things were better then because in most cases you were a child. So all you had to do was eat, have fun, and open presents. The burden of organising, shopping, cooking, cleaning fell to the women, usually one or two, while everyone else sat around having fun. There was usually tension because of some people not getting on but forcing it because it's Christmas. Being forced to give creepy uncles kisses to say thanks for the presents ... Yuk. My mum feeling the obligation to go to the gathering whether she wanted to or not so much so that she would do our own family Christmas on boxing Day where she could do xmas the way she wanted. How many of those adults at those great parties would have been secretly wishing they could have just been at home?

Agreed! I've thought about this a lot recently. It's all fun and games when all you have to do is run around eating sweets and playing with new toys 😂

@Ifailed I grew up in the 70s & my maternal grandparents always had a huge gathering on Christmas day - not only for family but they also often had elderly community members there too. Over the course of my childhood I remember them giving a home to 2 different people who had nowhere else to go & also frequently hosting townspeople who had emigrated & returned home to visit but mo longer had family alive.
They lived in a very modest 3 bed terraced house & my grandfather worked in a factory & my grandmother was a housewife. No mansions. No unlimited budget. Just an openess & a willingness to make it work. They would share their last penny if you were in need.

We lived in the next town but often stayed over Christmas.& we could be 3 to a bed to fit as many in as possible. It was normal to us.

In our own home here we've had a mix of types of Christmas. Mostly we've had my parents here, many times with my sibling & partner too. And a couple of time it's just been the 3 of us.

We have hosted dhs family at New Year for many years & he has a much bigger family so that's given our dc the experience of big family get togethers.

This year we will have a minimum of 15 & possibly 18 on Christmas day. I know it's a lot of work but it's one day & as we all get older I feel the importance of it mote & more. Right now we're all still here. And thats worth celebrating .
We live in a 3 bedroom house & don't have unlimited budget but we've put money aside to do it.

Not everyone had a Chistmas like that but if you want that and so does the rest of your family, then what's stopping you? As the country is no longer majority Christian, why should they get to dictate how things are done anymore is probably the biggest reason for the change.

I think more people live further from extended family now. My in-laws (and DCs only cousin) live 3 hours away. We see my parents who live 1.5 hours away on Christmas Day.

There aren't many children in my extended family, I don't know if that's unusual. Out of four cousins, I was the only one to have children. I think families are more likely to get together if there are children involved.

My mum used to host the big Christmas, but the family got too big for it to be possible (25+) so we broke off into smaller groups as adults, we now have teen to adult children of our own. I'm starting to bring everyone back together, this year I'll have 10 from mine and dps family, lot's of music, food, games and booze. Last year was 6 so it's growing 😅OP can you host? Someone has to get the ball rolling if it's going to happen.

A question to all those who are saying they miss having a big Christmas get-together with extended family - what’s stopping you hosting one yourself? Maybe I’m mis-interpreting the majority of posts but it sounds like you miss going to someone else’s house to have fun, which precludes having to do the most of the donkey work to make it happen. No-one has really said (by the time I wrote my post!) “we offered to host a big family party but everyone declined”.

We still have this type of Christmas in my family as we’re all prepared to put in the work to make it happen.

Doesn't help when all you hear about is Christmas being about family when you've had lots of bereavements over the years.

Classic case of rose-coloured glasses. As many PPs have pointed out, it was great fun as a child, but all the work and stress fell to the women.

Imagine a thread where the OP complains that she doesn't want hordes of relatives descending for Xmas, because she's got to spend the whole time cooking/cleaning, and there's only one bathroom and not enough beds or chairs. Everyone would sympathise and say she's NBU!

@orbitalcrisis not sure why all these people who don’t identify as Christian are bothering to celebrate Christmas at all! Why shouldn’t Christians have their festival their way.

Come to mine. It's bedlam 🎄🤣

The OP's post describes my Christmases exactly. Also a 70s child here. Difference is I LOATHED it. We only went to my mother's side as my father;s side don't celebrate christmas as they are jewish. My mother's side was toxic and abusive and my GPs were a 3 hour drive away. Leading up to it my mother would be ratty and (as my father described it recently) would 'savage' us beforehand as she was so stressed. She was trying to deal with family dynamics, being set up to fail by her oldest sister, an abusive father, a nasty vicious-tongued mother and we would all have to stay there for a few days. My sister and I would get told off all the time if we did not join in with our much older cousins (who mostly sat around drinking and popping each others pimples) and trying to avoid the sleazy uncle who used to feel us up. On one occasion I shouted at sleazy uncle when he grabbed my breasts and my mother's reaction was to slap me across the face and to tell me to fucking behave for her sake. Then we would finally go home and my mother would sob the entire drive home.

I have not had a Christmas with extended family since I was 19. I am nearly 50. Having to interact with extended family has played no small part in my decision to move continents. My parents finally gave up on it about 5 years ago and now take a cruise every year on their own instead.

I have Christmas with my family unit of 4 and love it. I am not giving that up for anyone. (Mind you, my PILs who were wonderful are sadly deceased. It used to be the 6 of us and I loved that).

You'd all chip in with food, no-one would host, as such. The children would sit on the floor, so would able adults, also on arms of chairs and knees. People living close meant chairs could be carried round. Being picture perfect wasn't the aim. I agree that it was a lot of work for the women, though. In houses the equivalent size of three bed new builds (and smaller), families would have 3-9 children. You just got on with life.

@sandgrown That is my point in a way, although poorly explained. I don't celebrate xmas, but I do a winter celebration of sorts, just nothing Christian. Mainly Pagan traditions and gift giving on the solstice. If Christians want to do a big family celebration and not go shopping on Boxing Day, they can, it doesn't mean the majority of the population should be forced to.

We didn’t need to stay over as all lived in the same town. Dad helped with the cooking as him dropping the sprouts was a family legend. The younger ones ate round a card table. I’ve still got all my mum’s party games (mainly word games) in my Welsh dresser. No one to play them with though.