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Tag: Holidays

Wedding Wednesday – Spooky Invitations To A Halloween Wedding

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One of my husband’s friends in being married on Halloween this year. We received the invitation yesterday–or should I say, invitations! My husband’s invitation is for the ceremony, champagne reception, and evening buffet to follow. My invitation, however, only grants me entry for the cake and fizz and party after.

It’s pretty standard here in the UK to invite people to just the reception, which has taken me (an expat) a while to get used to, but this is the first time I have fallen a tier below my own husband in the wedding invitation hierarchy! I’m a bit baffled that they thought this would be okay.

Their invitations also directed us to their wedding website which insists children are more than welcome and they hope we will bring them along–but in this scenario do they think of them as my children or my husbands? 0723-14

This is hauntingly horrifying to send two different invitations to a married couple in which husband and wife are not invited to the same wedding events.

Holiday Guest Kindness

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I would love to share my holiday story! Some years ago, my fiance (now husband) and I were both fresh out of college and newly employed at low-paying entry level jobs. We moved into our first apartment at the beginning of December. It was very sparsely furnished, almost entirely with hand me downs. The rent and security, as well as the few things we had to purchase (a cheap set of dishes, things like that) had pretty much wiped out our meager savings. The cupboards were stocked with canned soup and ramen, and whatever other cheap items we could pick up.

A couple of weeks later, just before Christmas, a childhood friend of my husband’s (we will call him ‘Mark’) called and said he was taking a ski trip to the area, and would we mind putting him up to save the expense of the hotel? We told him he was certainly very welcome, but hoped he would not expect much in the way of entertainment and meals. We didn’t even have a spare bed or real couch, but he was welcome to sleep on the loveseat. He said that was fine, and arrived a couple of days later. I felt terrible that I did not have the means to provide very good accommodations, but tried to be as gracious a hostess as possible. Mark stayed for three days. On the morning of the day he planned to depart for home, I was awoken by a bit of a commotion in the kitchen. I got up and went to see what was going on.

Very early that morning, while we slept, Mark had gone out to a 24 hour grocery store, and was now stuffing our cupboards, refrigerator, and freezer with food. Staples (like bread, milk, flour and sugar), meat, fresh fruits and vegetables. He certainly spent as much on food as we would have on a hotel! I was dumbfounded, and began to cry. He simply said, “Thanks for letting me crash, and Merry Christmas.”

This was the most amazing act of kindness I have ever experienced, and truly made it a wonderful and very merry Christmas. 1007-15

One Big, Happy, Squished Family Celebration

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I was very young at this particular Christmas time, so my memory is hazy, but the memory of it has stayed with me all these years.

On one side of my family, the ages of my first cousins, siblings and myself spanned a couple of decades and more, so when I was a toddler, I attended my oldest first cousin’s wedding. He was finishing college and then graduate school, and he and his wife lived in the dorm complex in a very small apartment. I don’t know who first voiced the idea, or how so many normally practical people ended up agreeing to it, but the entire extended family was invited to spend the holiday with my cousin and his wife and baby son at the college a very few years after that wedding, and everyone accepted! As best I can remember, there were about 28 of us at the time including the host family. Normally, every Christmas was spent at my grandfather’s house at his insistence, and how he was convinced to do this, I’ll never know.

The entire family descended upon that tiny apartment, between the men’s and women’s dorms which were devoid of any other students because of the holiday. There wasn’t room for everyone to even sit in one room, so naturally, we were all spending the night—by invitation — since the accommodations were so grand!

I don’t remember how we handled eating, perhaps a lunch room, but I remember getting ready for bed in shifts, and going to talk to my mother before I was taken off to my sleeping spot. She was bundled into a bed with three other women, and all four were giggling almost to hysteria. My dad was sleeping in the lounge in the men’s room. He was lucky because he got a couch. The younger male cousins had to sleep on the floor on a pallet.

My slightly older sister, a female cousin of her age, my very youngest male cousin who is two years younger than I, and of course, me, were put on a pallet in some sort of gymnasium type room, which seemed enormous to me at the time, but was probably not large at all. I think some older cousins might have been across the room on the floor, but in my child’s memory of it, it was just the four of us. My little cousin, who was a real tough acting little boy with a notorious temper, cautiously reached over and put his hand in mind and whispered, “I’m kind of scared. Will you hold my hand? Just don’t tell anyone.” I squeezed his hand, assured him it was fine, and that it was our secret. I was about six, but his fear made me feel brave. We slept well.

The next day was a crazy day of opening a mountain of presents, visiting, and packing up to go. People had slept in rows on the living room floor, I discovered, in addition to the crowded bed and the other rooms that were used. It should have been a nightmare, or at least a fine submission as a Holiday Hell story, but it wasn’t.

Instead, it was fun. We enjoyed ourselves happily while we laughed and laughed, and we continued to laugh over that Christmas for years to come. No one ever complained; they always re-told the funny parts over and over. I never squealed on my little cousin, who is now a fine upstanding man and a loving grandfather to little ones as well. It was the Christmas celebration of a lifetime. We never wanted to do it again, but we wouldn’t have missed it for the world! 1006-15

Thanksgiving Dinner Drama – When Traditions Must Change

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HELP.  The dreaded holiday season is now upon us, and it’s only dreaded because of stupid family dynamics. I have a pretty big extended family who traditionally has Thanksgiving dinner together at my Mom’s house. We’ve gotten pretty big now that more of us have gotten married, there are more kids, boyfriends, girlfriends, etc. We’re talking close to 40-45 people.

In addition, my husband’s family has Thanksgiving lunch, as they’ve always done, so he and I usually hit both families (lots of driving, hustling around, no fun for us). His family doesn’t feel comfortable with mine and has yet to accept the invitation to jump on our Thanksgiving and drop their own (and, why should they?).

So, this year, my husband and I have taken over hosting Thanksgiving for a few reasons, including, my Mom is tired of doing it, and we don’t really want to drag our then 8 month old baby through all of that. We want to ENJOY the holiday.

From my side, we invited my parents, my brother, his wife and their two kids, my SIL’s Mom and her husband. From my husband’s side, we invited his parents and his sister and her husband (chain ends there). Well, my aunt and uncle (mom’s brother) are just up in arms that we’ve divided the family and that we have the audacity to suggest we get together at a restaurant on Friday to still celebrate after Black Friday shopping. They are threatening to never speak with any of us again (they’ve all already been fighting since a family gone wrong Greece vacation in June 2014).

What am I supposed to do?? Host 50-55 people in our home for Thanksgiving? I can’t just invite my extended family, we would have to invite my husband’s too, and where would all these people go? And, how is that fun for anyone? Even if we do a potluck, I can’t imagine hosting that! At what point do you draw the line and stop inviting all of these arms of people???

I’m now being blamed for breaking up the family, when all I want is for my son to be able to enjoy the holiday with both sets of grandparents and his FIRST cousins without dragging him 150 miles in the car that day. 1103-15

The inevitable conclusion of creating a family holiday tradition is that eventually it cannot be sustained for a variety of reasons. My husband’s mother’s side of the family hosted an annual holiday get together which had become monstrously huge due to the fact that my MIL was one of 11 siblings!   Every cousin was there so you can imagine how large this gathering was.   But eventually the sisters who hosted this extravaganza grew too old to continue the tradition and it faded into oblivion because none of the subsequent generations was willing to keep it going.

Your mother, as the longtime hostess of the family gathering, should be the one who informs her brother that the tradition she had begun and maintained is in need of a change of plans.  I suspect that your mother was the one who did the bulk of the food preparations while her brother contributed little in comparison.  The people who protest the change in family traditions that are typically associated with eating food are usually the ones who have not invested the most time in hosting, cooking and cleaning.   I can’t recall receiving stories from longtime host/hostesses of big family events bitterly complaining about the change in those traditions since it is they who are weary from often decades of serving the family.

Your aunt and uncle could have volunteered to take over hosting duties for Thanksgiving but appear, instead, to prefer to whine and guilt manipulate to sustain a tradition that serves their needs rather than the needs of your mother to have a break or her desire to pass on the hosting to someone else.  So, the fundamental question to be asked in this situation is,  “Who is being served?”, when assessing people’s attitudes and behaviors.    Your choice to host a smaller family event serves your mother, your husband’s family and your own family.   Your aunt and uncle’s behavior serves themselves with no consideration for the guilt they inflict on your mother for having the audacity to be tired of years of holiday hospitality and family drama they generate because you choose to host a smaller celebration.   It’s all about them.   And when people choose to serve themselves selfishly with no apparent regard for how that affects people they allege to love, I believe you must stiffen the polite spine, ignore the tantrums and continue to extend a cheerful welcome for them to join you and the family for dinner on the Friday after Thanksgiving at a restaurant (making sure you communicate to them that they are paying for themselves unless otherwise arranged).

 

Jimmy Kimmel’s Annual Halloween Exploitation of Children

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I’m sure by now most people know about the famous talk show host who sends out a challenge every year for parents to record telling their children that they ate the children’s Halloween candy. This is done as a prank for fun. It seems kind of mean to me, but I will say it also shows that there are some truly gracious children out there, too. Some of the kids actually express forgiveness and love toward their parents, despite losing all the candy they worked so hard to acquire. 1106-14

This is an annual challenge by late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel to film your kids after telling them, “I TOLD MY KIDS I ATE ALL THEIR HALLOWEEN CANDY”.    I decided to not embed sample videos into this post in keeping with this site’s firm position against exploitation of children.

It’s a challenge just to watch these videos.   What we witness are parents deliberately lying to their children telling them a falsehood that all their candy that the child has accumulated through trick or treating has been consumed by one or both parents while the child slept and there is none left.   The reactions of the children are predictable and in the case of the younger children they respond as if the world has crashed on them.   At that age, a pile of candy is a rare treasure and a beloved parent has unjustly taken it all.  Jimmy Kimmel himself understands this, “You know, for kids, Halloween candy is a sacred thing.  For a lot of them it’s the first time they ever earn anything.”   The collection of videos records reactions of  shock, disbelief, anger, tears, screaming, tantrums, despair, rage at parents, declarations of hatred, threats of physical violence, loss, grief all displayed on unpretentious little faces.   There are rare examples of sad but gracious understanding by a few children but what harm is done when that precious quality is tested and exploited for a joke?  The audience finds these displays to be quite laughable.  In a 2013 montage, one little boy understands the moral depravity of the joke played on him when he cries, “Well, that wasn’t very kind.”    What parent does this?

Most of these children are pre-schoolers who lack the cognitive maturity to recognize the potential of a prank being played on them or to reason why a hungry parent didn’t eat a peanut butter sandwich or to handle this kind of news well.   This annual tradition is nothing more than an exploitation of vulnerable and gullible little children for the entertainment of adults.

For the chance of a youtube video to be featured on The Jimmy Kimmel Show after Halloween, pranking parents are willing to teach their children a host of undesirable truths that have the potential for negative consequences over time.   Truths such as…1) Mom and Dad will lie to you to get an emotional rise that they will film and disseminate to a worldwide audience.   2)  Mom and Dad will not respect your ownership of private property.   3) Mom and Dad will manipulate your emotions to amuse themselves.  4)  Parents cannot be trusted.   5) Blameshifting.   A surprising number of parents excuse their choice to prank the child by blameshifting to Jimmy Kimmel for “making” them pull this prank.   6)  Undermines the value of a sincere apology if Mom or Dad are willing to “apologize” for something that never really happened.   6)  Jerking people’s chains resulting in an emotional reaction is great fun!

If we were to reverse the roles, many parents would find this type of behavior by a child to be disrespectful and troubling.  It is therefore an abuse of the power inherent to being a parent to put one’s children through emotional hoops for the sake of a laugh or to become entertainment fodder for strangers.   Would we find it amusing if those same children, upon becoming adults caring for their aged parents, played a prank on mentally challenged senior citizens that manipulated emotions for the entertainment of others?   As a society we consider that abusive but for some odd reason, children are fair game.

EtiquetteHell has been consistent over the years that minor aged children should never be exploited on television and social media to provide entertainment for a audience that now can easily span around the globe.   Minor aged children lack the maturity to understand the consequences of losing their right to privacy and are therefore dependent on adults to protect them until they reach an age where they can make informed choices as to how they will be depicted.  It’s obvious that there are parents who have no qualms about exploiting their children if it means a moment of fame.

Just stop, Jimmy.