Awkward family moments at Christmas…

Ahhh, Christmas, its is that awesome time of year where we line up for weekends beforehand to spend time with those people in our family that we don’t see for sometimes up to a year at a time.  You know the ones… Do you have some like this?

Your cousin Margaret who has a penchant for telling you for hours on end just how perfect her daughter is in every way, even though you know many of the stories are inflated gumpf.

Your nephew who each year brings along to the family party a pretty young thing to fawn over him who looks ever so similar to the one he brought last year and the year before but is definitely not the same girl.

Your niece who has three adorable if rather noisy and annoying young children who insist on ripping open every present at an astounding pace then turning around to ask for more, disappointed, never saying thank-you.

Your brother in law, Bob who sits quietly in the corner nursing a bottle of red and rolling his eyes.

Your uncle who is  on his fourth wife, who is in fact the same age as his first son’s  wife, has just had another child.  Sound familiar?

Maybe even a cousin who fancies herself as a girl of the playboy mansion, complete with boob job, miniskirts and uber-bleached hair.

Families in my opinion make for the best entertainment, and I am blessed with a large, messy one thanks to several marriages, divorces, and extra rounds of children that joined us along the way.  It makes for a great Christmas that we can all smile about and enjoy implicitly

It is funny how we all see ourselves at the epicentre of “our family” and at Christmas, we battle to stay that.

The awkwardness starts when we start debating who will be the host each year and the debate hots up.  Top of the list sits the person who didn’t host last year.  Bottom of the list sits the person without a pool, but don’t tell them because they might get offended.

The moment we all dread and yet get very excited about at the same time is the first time a son or daughter turns up with the new love of their life for a Christmas dream come true only to have the whole family’s dirty laundry on display (see above for those delights).  You forget how much an outsider can find out about your family by watching Christmas day unfold from start to finish, from greed to drunk in 15 hours.

The moment when someone doesn’t have a reciprocal gift will always be there, and the reaction you have to have is a careful one.  No one likes someone else to feel ungraciously received, except those who do… sometimes unfortunate.

And then we have the competitive cooking competition as everyone strives to be the best.  Competitive dish cooking hit an all time extreme in our family when there was three new wives and mothers in the family, all trying to prove their usefulness to their mother in law.  Over the years some of  the men have stepped in and started to cook too and the womens competition has calmed a little.  Do the members of your family “cook” to compete?

And in final we pay tribute to the fart jokes, that we can never manage to escape.  Why is it that Christmas always descends to toilet humour when all the family gets together.

Tell us about the awkward, amusing or entertaining moments at Christmas in your family.  We’d  love to hear your stories.