All families are different. I have been so lucky with my own. When you grow up crammed into a small house with 8 people, you learn to place a high premium on just getting along. Now there are 12 of us. We all get along and just enjoy spending time with one another. When we get together for the holidays, we pack into the family room and watch corny movies just to be in each other's company. We are completely informal and never hold grudges. We end our phone calls with, "I love you." When my mom died, we just became all the more like this - not counting about 6 months of absolute hell.
For the reasons I listed earlier and because this year I am not able to have Christmas with my family for the first time ever, I never doubted that I would be cooking a thanksgiving meal. I intended to invite whoever in my family wanted to come, Jason's parents, sister, and his grandparents. This also required that I invite Jason's single aunt. We are friends with one of Jason's uncles so we were going to invite him along too. That's when things got complicated. Jason and his uncle said the other aunts and uncles would be angry that they weren't invited. So, instead of doing what I normally do, inviting the folks I wanted to invite and letting everyone else get over it, I held off - talking to my family and a couple of friends who live far away from their families to figure out how many people we would be able to invite from Jason's family (over and above the parents & grandparents, etc).
We got together with his parents one evening in mid-October and his mother announced "We're holding Thanksgiving." Jason responded, "So are we." His mother was upset. We offered to combine but she wasn't interested in having dinner with my family and our friends. However, when she asked who was coming, Jason, doing what they do in his family, neglected to tell his mother that his one uncle was planning to dine with us. Why is this? He didn't want to let on that he had invited that uncle before his own mother because she would be upset.
Jason's mom called his uncle this morning to find out if he is coming to her place for Thanksgiving only to learn that he is coming to our place. She then called Jason in tears, telling him what an awful son he was for inviting his uncle after he knew that she had also invited him. She claims that she reported our heartless behavior to HER mother - so undoubtedly everyone now knows that we, of everyone in the family, invited only this one uncle. Jason called me all distraught and I told him he should stop playing their games and call her and explain exactly how it all went - that the uncle was invited before we even knew she was having dinner -that we had planned to invite her but had not gotten to it before she decided to hold dinner -and that the offer to combine (at our place) was still on the table.
Jason made the call but no dice. They hate us now - well, actually, him, they never liked me. His mother wouldn't even talk to him. Now he is upset and angry with me. Probably partially because I want to cook a Thanksgiving dinner and partially because I will still take his calls. And, of course, because I am evil.
It's like they operate on the premise that, whatever it is - love, company, holidays - there isn't enough of it to go around. Why?
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