CONTENT WARNING: Violence, Injury Detail

I was a young kid the year my dad was diagnosed with diabetes, so no delicious pie and treats for him at the big family gatherings. My dad’s brother (my uncle) makes awesome pies and is a huge troll, like HUGE.

He comes over with a pumpkin, apple, cherry, and blueberry pie for the next family gathering:

Uncle: “These are all for [Dad]!”

Dad: “Oh f*** off!”

Uncle: “Try one! They’re extra good this year!”

My uncle just keeps teasing him all day. When we’re seated for the meal:

Dad: “Can you pass me the potato?”

My uncle, of course, passes him pie.

My dad gets up, walks over to my uncle, and punches him right in the face, breaking his nose. He’s on the floor, bleeding, shouting for help. My mom, sitting near him, leans over and offers him pie.

That was the last time I saw him for a whole decade.

I’m the author of this story. My grandmother is afflicted with the hoarding curse but has been slowly decluttering with help from my aunts and uncles.

My mother’s side of the family has gotten together for Christmas. Usually, each grandparent sets aside a certain amount of money for each parent to use to purchase gifts for their children on the grandparents’ behalf, but my grandmother has broken the mold a bit this year by personally getting two gifts for my cousin’s toddler daughters. No one knows what they are, but her kids figure that if the gifts are a flop, they’ll just dispose of them quietly.

When the other presents have been opened, my grandmother gives the two toddlers their final gifts. They gleefully rip off the paper to find two matching pink Care Bear dolls that they promptly squeal over. My grandmother looks very pleased with herself, but every adult in the room is looking at either the dolls or my grandmother, slack-jawed.

Aunt: *Quietly* “Didn’t you have a doll that looked like that as a kid?”

Mom: “Yeah, forty years ago! But I only ever had one, and it definitely wasn’t either of those!”

My grandmother had managed to pull two identical, forty-year-old Care Bears in perfect condition out of her basement hoard to give to her great-granddaughters. If not for the dated design, you wouldn’t be able to tell that they were older than half the party’s attendees.

The hoarding curse is set to skip those girls’ generation, but if either of them has kids, maybe the dolls will get another forty years in THEIR toy chests!

Related:
Great-Great-Grandpa’s Grand Gathering Of Garbage And Goodies

CONTENT WARNING: Pet Death (Prior to story)

This is the story of one of the most awkward Christmases I’ve ever been a part of.

[Boyfriend] and I always go to [Aunt] and [Uncle]’s house for Christmas with the rest of [Boyfriend]’s family. It’s usually a pretty good time; there’s a grand meal, conversations, fun stories, and lots of gifts.

The Christmas of this story was… not so great.

[Aunt] had three dogs, and one of them was very old and ill for a while and had sadly passed away several months before that Christmas.

Something I should mention is that [Aunt] is very dramatic. It’s not that someone shouldn’t be sad about losing a pet, but [Aunt] takes tragedy to another level. She is definitely a wallower. She cried and moped to every member of the family every day for months about losing her dog, bringing it up at every opportunity, and frankly, ruining a lot of special get-togethers by bringing it up. We all tried our best to comfort her even though we were growing weary of it.

Now, [Uncle] is the complete opposite of [Aunt]. He’s boisterous, giddy, and always the life of any group situation, cracking jokes, telling stories, and being positive.

Apparently, during this time, [Aunt] had told [Uncle] in her grief that she wanted to go dig up her departed dog just to cuddle him one more time. A little morbid, yes… but we all say and do strange things when we’re grieving. [Uncle] took this as an opportunity to get [Aunt] a thoughtful gift for Christmas. He had seen something online about this company that makes stuffed replicas of people’s deceased pets (not like a plush thing — slightly more lifelike), and apparently, they were quite expensive. 

Just before the gift-giving on this particular Christmas, [Uncle] quietly told a few of us what he had gotten for [Aunt]. Our private reactions amongst ourselves were a collective “Uh-oh…”

While the thought was very sweet and meaningful and [Uncle]’s heart was in the right place… we all knew [Aunt] well enough to know this wouldn’t go down well.

Sadly, we were right.

[Aunt] happily tore into the gift from her husband, with all of us holding our breath and watching. When she pulled the stuffed replica of her deceased dog from the box… she immediately burst into tears and fled from the room.

You could have cut the silence in the living room with a knife. [Uncle] looked very embarrassed, disappointed, and hurt. We all knew he was just trying to do something sweet that he thought his wife would cherish. I’m not sure how all of us anticipated his gift backfiring like it did, and he somehow didn’t see it coming.

We offered [Uncle] words of encouragement and tried to reassure him that we knew he meant well and that [Aunt] would come around and see how thoughtful his gift was once she got over the initial shock.

To add insult to injury, when the time came for [Uncle] to open his gift from [Aunt] (she was still bawling her eyes out in the back bedroom), he sullenly tore the paper off the box to see what his wife had given him for Christmas.

Her gift to him was a single shaker of steak seasoning.

None of us can figure out why they’re still together since the rest of the family knows both of them better than they apparently know each other, but that’s not for us to judge. Suffice it to say, the family cleared out pretty quickly after the gifts, and last we heard, [Aunt] and [Uncle] didn’t speak to each other for an entire week after that Christmas.

It’s the night before my husband’s sister’s fifteenth birthday party (the big one here), so the house is packed and everyone has been preparing for tomorrow. As such, we decide to order burgers, and my husband sorts out the order.

Me: “So are you going to pick it up or is it delivery?”

Husband: “Delivery, look at the size of the order we’ve ordered for [starts listing people].”

Me: *After about eight people.* “And [Sister]?”

Husband: *Crickets.*

Me: “You did remember to order for [Sister], right? The whole reason people are here?”

Husband: *Runs towards the kitchen.* “Mum!”

It was all sorted, and we had enough food for everyone, but really?

This occurred many years ago, before the turn of the millennium, when I was but a wee “innocent” fifteen-year-old. I was also a very late baby for my parents compared to everyone else in the family (my half-brother was fifteen years older than me and in the middle of everyone else’s tightly packed ages), so everyone in “my” generation was already a grown adult, and anyone in “the next” was still three or less. And being in this weird middle-ground caused even more issues than normal, basically all the out-of-the-loop of being an only child without the stereotypical fawning attention. 

It was bad enough that the now-grown “kids” were conversing with the recently-become-grandparents and great-aunts-and-uncles about adult things; I was well used to people talking “around” me while I was left in my own little world. More and more often, though, they were also now talking OVER me as I was trying to include myself in conversations, because I wasn’t just a little introverted child playing with his toys by himself anymore.

Admittedly, I was also in the middle of my “angsty teenager” phase, but in general, I didn’t really have much in my direct life to angst over; it was just very frustrating being ignored and verbally pushed aside any and every time I tried to interact in the most basic of ways. 

Cue Thanksgiving.

My mom’s already huffy that I wore jeans and a plain t-shirt to the dinner table instead of “dressing nice,” despite the fact that three adults visiting us were dressed the same and nobody said anything.

Everyone’s chatting away. I’m being ignored, as usual; not just in conversation, I often have to ask several times to get things passed to me. The only one being cool to me is my one uncle, who’s USUALLY the most condescending man I’ve met up to that point; maybe he was just the only one that actually noticed my ever-worsening expression.

Finally, FINALLY, someone goes to include me in a conversation; my dad had been going off about something computer-related, and another family member asked me if I knew anything about it, because I was “into that computer stuff.” Again, this was the mid-90s when that was something special.

Me: “Actually, yeah, I ju—”

Family Member: “Oh, hey, you know they’re putting more computers in at my job? We’re totally—”

I just SLAM my hands on the table, stand up, and shout something along the lines of:

Me: “IF I’M NOT ALLOWED TO TALK, JUST SAY SO!”

I then grab my plate and my drink and storm off to my room. Apparently, some called my “outburst” overdramatic or uncalled for. Honestly, I didn’t care. In a rare show of compassion, my dad (who grew up with the “men take care of their own problems” mindset and legitimately thought for years that it was best to ‘just figure it out ourselves’ if there were problems) eventually came to my room and asked what was up. 

I pointed out how I had been talked over and ignored all night long, how a couple of times could just be a mistake, but when it happened literally every single time for over an hour, it was infuriating.

This was when my dad imparted a secret unto me which I never forgot: my mother was the odd-one-out in her family in that she didn’t act that way, and he could barely stand the rest of the in-laws, because that was ALL THEY DID. They were just used to it with each other and would effectively carry on two to three conversations at once, with everyone just yammering over each other. It just “seemed” worse to me because my parents had raised me to actually be respectful, but had forgotten the whole “how to deal with disrespectful family members” side of things.

He asked if I wanted anything else from the table; he’d make me up a plate and bring it over, but I was good until dessert came around, and I’d probably be cooled down by then and just ignore everyone right back.

Dad’s suggestion: next time someone in the family tries that with me, just talk as loudly as I can over them instead. I also inherited his “big booming voice,” by the way; the rest of the night went okay, but come Christmas time and the next big gathering, it worked! The number of people who looked shocked that I even had a voice and actually could use it was quite gratifying.