Short version: my parents are awful, though highly sophisticated. My relatives are nice, if unsophisticated. I get on with my relatives. My parents endelessly criticize the relatives to me, trying to teach me that the rellies are just troglodytes.
How do I handle this????
Long version:
Both my parents have undiagnosed autistic traits. I have ASD (diagnosed) and can recognize that both my parents are further along the spectrum than I am, and that this contributes to the social issues that they have.
I'm getting into awkward territory as I have relatively recently moved countries and begun to be friendly with parts of the family that my parents have always strongly disliked for exceptionally petty reasons.
Since the 1960s, the few interactions between my parents and the rest of the family have been either at my parents' house or at the mutual grandmother's house (she passed away 15 years ago).
Mutual grandmother was lovely, humble, unsophisticated, nice, and fed everyone cups of tea, orange juice, biscuits and cheese, and was delighted everyone was having a nice chat. She was a country girl who had moved to the city and not really taken on the manners of the society she'd moved into. Likewise her husband (who died before I was born).
My mother learnt to entertain guests in a different way entirely. Both parents now see my mother's way as the way to go. To them it entails getting out the best porcelain, silver cutlery, lead crystal, linen tablecloths, etc. - and my mother cooking from scratch for days beforehand like a good 1960s housewife - and being wildly insulted if a child doesn't like the (very 1960s-1970s) food, or if a well-meaning relative does the dishes and breaks a plate. They're still telling the story - to other guests - about my hapless aunt who broke a lead crystal glass, 40 years later.
Entertaining at my place, or any other relatives' place, involves a stir-fry, the kitchen plates (we don't own any others), and a nice bottle of wine drunk out of the cheap wine glasses we got for nothing 10 years ago. Sometimes I might make a cake if i'm really feeling domesticated. My parents think this is unacceptably gauche and evidence that I am subnormal and my (their!) relatives are just clueless.
The conversation is also a bit odd.
My DF has a prodigious memory for random facts and tells extremely long, involved stories - and then has conversations and wild, shouting arguments about facts, with my mother, completely excluding all the guests, whose eyes have long ago glazed over.
My mother's conversation tends to centre around facts from books she's read (that 99.99% of her guests haven't read), idolizing highly-cultured people (that 99.99% of her guests haven't heard of), talking as though she knows these people intimately, tearing other (absent) people to shreds for their perceived stupidity, boringness or frumpiness, and having shouting matches about all this stuff with my father.
So you can see that afternoon tea chez my parents is a bit bloody grim, even if the food's nice and served on nice plates. My parents have no idea why their "moronic, troglodytic" nieces and nephews appear frightened of them, why my father's siblings avoid him and DM, and why the siblings and their kids and grandkids actually all get on so well with one another. I am seen as a traitor for joining in with all the siblings and cousins.
My DM characterizes herself as the "kind generous aunt who goes to all the effort to make afternoon tea/dinners for these boring frumpy rude morons who wouldn't make conversation". She genuinely has no idea why they might not like her.
My Df has some insight as to why other people might just not "be into" him or my DM. He'd characterize people stepping back a bit as other people having their own lives to lead and maybe just not having that much in common with him and DM.
Is there anything I can do other than turn it all into a novel (slightly too much like Brideshead)?