The holidays are a time of festivities and cheer. Whether it’s the stress or the crowd, when festive cheer goes awry, we’re here for all the smoke.
We do it to ourselves; we plan holiday events that we want to be perfect and beautiful, but we invite our families. Although this should be a time to celebrate and set aside differences, it’s also the only time you see some of these people, and that can be stressful and uncomfortable.
Here are some holiday stories in which the festive cheer went awry.
The wrong outsider
If you’re invited to a holiday family dinner with your significant other, you need to find a way to blend in. It’s not a good idea to make yourself, or your social media desires, the center of attention. While this story didn’t get violent, the girlfriend of a cousin wanted to make a big deal of the holiday family dinner on social media but expected the 90-year-old grandparents to leave the room because they were “too old” to fit her idea of what the family dinner should look like. Yikes!
What was mom thinking
The holidays aren’t typically the best time to tell your spouse that you’re having an affair. The festive cheer goes awry when a mother tells her daughter that she was wearing a diamond necklace from her boyfriend at a holiday dinner. The husband didn’t know about the boyfriend, but soon found out, and the mother ended up waking out of the family on New Year’s Day. Happy New Year to that family; what a terrible start to the year.
Forced out of the closet
Family fights are almost a requirement during the holidays, but sometimes, those fights lead to some extremely unfortunate events for other people in attendance. When two uncles, likely brothers, got into a fistfight at a holiday party, one uncle outed the other’s son to the family. Imagine having your uncle, who you probably trusted with your secret, telling your whole family that you are gay in front of the entire family. That certainly made for an awkward and upsetting holiday for the family.
Some people’s kids
Entitlement has become a huge problem in some families, and one such family experienced what happens when the children feel and act entitled to everything. In this instance, the holiday cheer goes awry when the stepchildren of a newly married couple break into their home. These children were all over 30 at the time, and they broke in on Christmas, ripped open all the presents, and took what they wanted before leaving a huge mess. This put a huge wedge in this family that lasted more than 30 additional years. Can you imagine?
Unrelated relatives
We can joke all we want about incest taking place within families, but when family members aren’t actually related by blood but find themselves attracted to each other through normal means or with the assistance of alcohol, things can get out of hand. In this story, a stepsister got pregnant by a brother-in-law at the family Christmas party. That was certainly an awkward beginning to life for that child and for the family members. When at family parties, keep your hands and other body parts to yourself.
Timing couldn’t be worse
When you want the smoke and want to see how a family can blow up when holiday cheer goes awry, one of the fastest ways to make that happen is to see an uncle show up with his mistress in full view of his wife and kids. This should never happen, but certainly not during the holidays in front of extended family, but one uncle was dumb enough to think this was acceptable behavior. The family never recovered from the fallout, which isn’t a big surprise.
Hide the guns
Alcohol and guns don’t mix, as proved at one Christmas party with an uncle who was pretty drunk got angry with his sister, and started looking around the house for his gun. Thankfully, there were other adults in the room who were able to get the kids and everyone else out of the house while the drunk uncle went to find his gun. That had to be the end of spending time with that uncle during the holidays. How do you recover from that?
These are just a few stories of how holiday cheer goes awry when the wrong feelings and the stress of the season combine with the one time each year you see some of these people. Try to keep your family off this list this year. Happy Holidays!
Sarah Johnson