Share your first experience celebrating with ILs

angelakh

Since I am bored and DH has DD occupied...

Share how you celebrated your first Christmas/Holiday experience with DH/ILs.

Que*Syrah

I'll let you know next week. We're having our first Christmas with them this year!

We have had MIL at my parents house before but never the extended IL family.

angelakh

Here's mine:

We spent Thanksgiving weekend at IL's house.  On black Friday we went shopping, DH, MIL, FIL, and SIL all picked out their presents, bought them, and then took them home and wrapped and put them under the tree.

When DH and I returned for Christmas they all opened their gifts and acted really surprised.  I couldn't believe they were for real.  That was nothing like what we did growing up! 

danienross

Not sure if you mean the first year we were together or the first year we were married.

The first year we were dating we didn't spend Christmas together.  I was seventeen so I planned to go back to Oklahoma with my dad.  Back story: Parents are divorced.  I lived with dad at the time but mom lived back in Oklahoma as well as most of my family.  About a week before Christmas my dad's oldest sister was given less than a week to live so we left sooner than planned.  Got to Oklahoma just in time to find out my Grandma (dad's mom) had been diagnosed with breast cancer.  They got my Grandma discharged from the hospital so they could drive to California to try to say goodbye to my aunt.  They being Grandma, dad, and his other siblings.  They couldn't fly because my Grandma required oxygen.  They got there five hours too late.  All in all, not a great holiday.

The first year we were married we'd only been married about two months and DH had been gone pretty much all of it.  DH was training to deploy and got to come home on leave.  It was supposed to be 'my year' (meaning we agreed before we got married that we would go to Oklahoma to see my family every other Christmas) but we decided to stick close to home.  We went to his aunts house (which was the norm for him).  His aunt loves to cook/host and all was well.  It was good to not think about the impending first deployment.

Hope2Have

My dh's dad's side of the family are redneck-ish to put it nicely... and I mean really really redneck. His dad has 12 brothers and sisters and they all have grandkids by now, so you can imagine how many people were in this small house (by the way, 50% smoke inside). Anyways, so there I am being introduced to a thousand people, very uncomfortable and they have this gag gift tradition that's been going around for 20+ years where they wrap this gigantic pair of panties and give it to an unsuspecting person each year. So....... guess who got it our year?!? My dh... so we, yes we... had to get into the panties, one in each leg to pose for everyone to take pictures... it was awful!

Hope2Have

KateB1984:

My first Christmas with the inlaws.... my inlaws used to do a Christmas Eve dinner with friends, a Christmas breakfast with some elderly family members, a Christmas dinner with friends and a Boxing Day dinner with all of the extended family. My inlaws live out of town.

I've always spent Christmas eve/morning at home, and wanted to do that. So DH and I decided we would spend Christmas Eve with my family (our hometown) and then Christmas morning together before driving down to join the inlaws at noon to spend Christmas day/dinner and Boxing Day with them. We visited the elderly relatives at their group home on the way with pointsettias and baking because we'd missed breakfast with them.

DH had proposed on Dec 18th, and this was the first time we'd seen his family since.

Because DH chose to spend Christmas eve/breakfast in our hometown, with me, for the first time, his family was pissed off. His brother and sister gave us the silent treatment, refusing to even acknowledge we were in the room. My MIL & FIL were cold and MIL was commenting how rude it was of us to skip important family gatherings (while we were in earshot to hear). We were supposed to stay in MIL/FIL's guest room, but SIL decided she wanted to stay there, so told us (not asking) to go to her place instead. At first I was relieved to get out of the uncomfortable environment, but we arrived to find her disgustingly filthy room with 40-50 condom wrappers littered on the floor around the bed and used condoms in the overflowing garbage. We slept on the couch in the living room because it was too late to drive home.

The next day DH's cousins asked to see my engagement ring at Boxing Day dinner, and I teared up because after 1.5 days with my new inlaws-to-be, nobody had congratulated us on our engagement or even acknowledged it or looked at my ring.

To this day, I'm still so sad thinking about how happily we'd walked in to share Christmas with them and how the complete shunning we received was a slap in the face.

Wow. Thanks for opening an old wound

Wow... that sucked! Hope your relationship with them went up from there... )

Makes me having to pose in gigantic underwear seem less bad...

angelakh

Oh no!  Not meaning to open wounds at all!  Sorry, that must have sucked big time ):

selockar

I have never spent Christmas with the ILs. We spent Thanksgiving with his family when we were engaged. It was awful. My sil and bil got so drunk they started fighting. I tried to excuse myself and go to bed. They then turned to me and started yelling at me to go back to Wisconsin, where people actually liked me (I'm not from Wisconsin). I said nothing and went upstairs. They then continued yelling, eventually throwing things. We ended up making a 5 hour drive home at midnight. According to DH this is not abnormal for his family. Thankfully my DH is nothing like them, and decided we would spend all future holidays with my family. I feel kinda bad about that, but it was his decision. He stands by it even more now that we have DS and another on the way.

nekorayne

It was nice, but I love my MIL. My family was never really into Christmas and DH had mentioned that to his mom so I think she wanted to make it specail foer me because hse went out of her way. LOL, she bought me a really sweet prescent, asked me to help in the kitchen, and tried so hard to make me feel welcome. DH and I were just dating and so I was surprised that they made me my own stocking and just went out of thier way to make me a part of the family. But I think his mom knew I was her future DIL ever since I went on the ocean vacation with DH and his family. LOL, it was just a sweet Holiday!

Dr.Loretta

I went to DH's grandma's house. 40+ people crammed into her split level house with cheesy poofs and cold cuts for dinner "because that's what we've done for 50 years". And no booze. FIL was mad at his siblings who started at a new church and dared to tweak the tradition by going to church at a different time than they had before.

DH's uncle came in and made a racist comment loud enough for the neighbors to hear. FIL's BFF asked when these people would stop breeding. DH left me to get something at his dad's and ended up driving around town for a while to see the lights, while I dealt with 40+ bigoted strangers.

Good times.