A suitably seasonal thread 🙂 given Xmas visits etc!

So, all families have their “peculiar” habits, and there’s nothing like marrying in to one for full on exposure to “odd to you” habits… Not a have a go at the in-laws thread, just things that you all find oddly different!

My in laws NEVER have any liquids on a meal table ??? They always wait until the end of a meal for a pot of tea. For me, a lifetime of having food & drink together means I’m hankering for a drink at the meal table. Mrs rkk01 realises this and often gets me / us a drink to go with the food – and that normally generates quizzical looks 🙁

So who wants to share some other families’ normality…!

…its better to drink after eating rather than during eating

You haven’t had to eat the MiL’s food….

Longing to live in a middle class hippy commune where we all just be happy so long as we have electric fine wine and big salaries to live off

Some days I laugh some days I walk away

Mine turned up 40 minutes late for Christmas Dinner and didn’t bat an eye lid. They had finished eating before I even sat down.

Time to fill in the holes and start on the new patio.

Never opening blinds on windows, or even opening windows for that matter. Stuffy and dark, great place for outdoors people 🙁

My brothers Christmas Eve,

His turn, we have done the last two yrs, ours a walk up Woburn, back to our house a massive spread of food, plenty of tea, alcohol and everything else,

His , a walk around the estate cut short as one of kids stepped in a dog bomb, back to his , 2 small hotdogs each and a small bowl of crisps and an even smaller bowl of Iceland’s finest onion rings between the eight of us, we didn’t get any of the crisps etc as they helped themselves first !

I faked a migraine , my wife drove me home (she knew) and went back to keep the kids happy

My MiL will fill the kitchen sink with hot water just to wash 2 mugs. I pointed out we have a dishwasher (as do they in fact)and plenty of spare mugs.
Her reasoning was “they use electricity” I then explained hot water requires energy to get like that, I suspect this explains why their gas bill is around £150 a month for a 2 bed cottage!!

My (now thankfully ex) MIL was worryingly god bothering, and regarded anyone who had more than a glass of wine with dinner as some pitiful alcoholic.

After a few visits I would wonder at the father in laws constantly full pint glass. When they’d left I would invariably find my beer supplies decimated! He’d perfected the art of topping up the Perpetually Full Pint (TM) without her noticing, so as to avoid tutting and general disgruntlement. After a while he started bringing his own, and with a knowing nod, smuggling them in to the house on visits. We kept this between ourselves.

If I’d lived with that bloody woman for 30 years, I’d be drinking heavily too!

Ramming three families, Children, Grandchildren, Great Grandchildren and other friends/neigbours/passers by into one small overheated cluttered house for the whole week!!!!!!

FFS!

talking through films.

agreeing to do christmas my way then spending the whole time making a big deal of it not being their way and or insisting its done in their order/their way.

despite having no experience of ever owning dogs, constantly questioning and telling us we ‘cant do that!’ to every little thing we did with the dog.

turning the TV up so they could hear it over their talking = ever increasing cycle of volume.

insisting they came for a dog walk, then walking slower than a snail despite knowing i needed to get back to cook christmas dinner for them as they didn’t want to wait to eat, meaning the dog and I covered about a 5th of the distance we should’ve in that time.

arghghg glad they’re gone now.

philconsequence – Member
talking through films.

turning the TV up so they could hear it over their talking = ever increasing cycle of volume.
Telling you whats happening on the screen (yes we know we’re watching it)

Holding the remote then falling asleep and pressing the volume + button so I have to run over and prise the remote out of their hands before the volume reaches demolition level.

TBH they are lovely people & I’m sure if I reach their age I will have developed much worse habits 😉

Telling you whats happening on the screen (yes we know we’re watching it)

i nearly locked the wife’s sister in the garden because of this, if it wasn’t telling us whats just happened, it was ‘oh no!’ ‘oh god’ and ‘oh wow’ to every little thing that went on.

granted she hadn’t seen ‘flight of the navigator’ before, but still 👿

Tbh – all of the above!

We had the wifes brothers two teenage twins.. 😥 lazy, petulant, ignorant, thick.. little twattocks!
They should be kept in camps with armed guards til they get past twenty..
Little ****!!!!!

Too many to mention, but a highly entertaining day with them.

Any in laws who expect me to wear a reindeer mask and antlers during dinner is ok with me 😉

The opposite of Binners – having to constantly refuse alcohol offered by FiL on a ten minutely basis! Next year I’m going to write ‘NO THANKS! I’m F**kin driving’ across my forehead….

We usually do a buffet style tea on Christmas day. Despite there being about 14 chairs out, the MIL ALWAYS insists on being first to to buffet and then getting a chair and sitting directly in front of the food that everyone else is trying to get to!

I don’t know whether it’s selfishness, stubbornness, stupidity or just a desire to be in the way

Oh the bliss of a small family.

Oh and despite moving halfway round the world to be closer to the missus family her sisters and family go and spend Christmas with friends instead.

Hi, my name is Peter and I am an in-law 😈

I think I’m going to have to have a quiet word with my daughters and ask them to be brutally honest with me…

OK, time to pop over to wwwinlawsnet and talk about the, erm, in-laws 8)

Oh, and not flushing the bog. The in-laws like to save water. No idea why, they have plenty…

But, their philosophy for toilet flushing is to let 3-4 piles of crap accumulate 🙁

I’m all for saving natural resources, but I can do without looking at someone else’s turds every time I visit the can

rkk01 – Member
Oh, and not flushing the bog. The in-laws like to save water. No idea why, they have plenty…

But, their philosophy for toilet flushing is to let 3-4 piles of crap accumulate

I’m all for saving natural resources, but I can do without looking at someone else’s turds every time I visit the can

^^ is just WRONG!

In Christmas’s past we’ve been round to my wife’s parents house. My fil sits watching television ALL THE TIME, I always think when you have guests round it’s polite to turn the TV off or at least turn the sound down. But no, your daughter, son in law and baby grandaughter are visitng for christmas so why don’t you watch dog the frigging bounty hunter on loud volume, that’s obvisouly far more important and fun than talking to us. When we have them over I make a large point of having the TV on and switching it off when they arrive while saying something to my daughter like ‘come on now we have guests, TV OFF.’ Then he sits looking at the blank screen as if willing it to switch on like a moron. Also for some reason he has installed battery operated air ‘freshners’ all over their house, including 2 in the living room/dining room. So you’re tucking into turkey and trimmings and then you suddenly get a blast of disgusting toilet scent pine fresh or similar, makes me wanna barf.
This year we had Christmas day at our house just the 3 of us, absolute bliss.

BREAD SAUCE. WTF. I thought they were having a laugh when they told me what the funny looking white sauce with cloves stuck in it was? I mean, Bread….Sauce???? 🙄

mine have a terrible habit of actually wanting to speak to me

What is worse is I am actually expected to answer back

if it’s yellow, let it mellow
If it’s brown, flush it down

if you wee, let it be
if you poo, flush must you

my in laws are great, it’s my own family i dread seeing

BREAD SAUCE. WTF. I thought they were having a laugh when they told me what the funny looking white sauce with cloves stuck in it was? I mean, Bread….Sauce????

Showing your age I’m afraid, standard Christmas Dinner staple for those of us over 40.

Bits of everything above, except the toilet thing which is just plum wrong! Also, they have a complete inability to switch things off, the house has been lit like the Blackpool illuminations, bet you could see our house from space the past few days.

Sometimes I wonder if we’d all better off not treating Xmas as a family occasion at all and just spending it on our own 🙂

Many years ago I spent New Year with my then girlfriend. By 10pm or thereabouts I was sitting in their lounge watching TV effectively on my own. They were all asleep. Given how mad the whole family was that may not have been a bad thing!

we did that this year. It was ace.

Mixing medication with alcohol. Really, I so much want to listen again to that slurred comment you made but 5 minutes ago (and several times before that).

My wife and her family are Italians [Naples]
Going there for family get-togethers is the most chaotic experience you could imagine, 30 or 40 of them all having their own conversations at 100mph and ever increasing volumes with the associated gesticulations.
I just find a safe place and sit there, drink the wine, eat the amazing food and laugh when everyone else does.

Sister in law’s 18 year old daughter.

Whole family round at her Grandparents for boxing day, the miserable little sod sits on her own with her coat on for six hours, refuses to eat the meal prepared for her and sulks like a small child.

The rest of ’em are a delight – mother in law is a ringer for Nursey from Blackadder, father in law does a great line in sarcasm and the brother, sister and sons in law are all delightfully odd.
Even the dogs are well behaved

Honestly, why the sour faced little brat doesn’t just stay at uni over Christmas is beyond me.

This year has been its and pieces of the above, made all the more interesting with it being the current Mrs. Pinkster’s birthday on Christmas Day as well.

Last Christmas was however marvelous. We decamped on Christmas Eve to a SC holiday let on the outskirts of Conwy, had Christmas dinner in the Groes Inn, which was amazing, and completely ignored the rest of the world.

I can highly recommend it.

After never having a Christmas on our own since being together, we decided this year to have just a small family one. Us and the kids. Brilliant! None of the stuff that always accompanies families, our day at our pace.

Bread sauce is ace!

Not flushing the loo after having a shit is just wrong though!

Mine are fine, though the mother inlaw does have the odd moment. This years was telling my GF (soon to be wife, getting married next year) that no one would be looking at what the groom or bride would be wearing and that the thing people will be most interested in is what the mother of the bride wears. I told her I wold wear shorts in that case, apparently not acceptable as there may be a picture of me and her together. She is great most of the rest of the time though!