Today I was informed that we will be going to the in-laws for Christmas. Now I am sure for those of you out there with significant others you are probably wondering what the big deal about this is. After all, isn’t spending the holidays with in-laws one of the standard consequences of having a significant other?
As a general rule, I suppose this is true: But, as you may remember, typically A. and I don’t do Christmas. This means that not only do we not do the whole shopping thing; we also prefer to spend the day alone. And up until now we have been successful. So successful in fact, that in the nearly five years that we have been together we have managed to avoid spending Christmas with any family, citing convincing reasons such as weather and distance.
However, to be honest since I am almost in the Christmas Spirit this year, I wouldn’t really mind celebrating Christmas Day in a semi-traditional way and am not as opposed to visiting the in-laws as I usually am.
For those of you who may not know, my in-laws (specifically MIL and SIL) and I have “issues.” I really don’t despise my in-laws and by now can even get along with them fairly well. Nevertheless, they (especially MIL) have the bad habit of getting on my nerves rather quickly and because of this I never really enjoy any time that I spend there. Therefore any excuse that I can come up with to avoid visiting them I will normally try to use.
However, today when A. delivered the Christmas sentence to me, he made a point that in truth I could not argue with. He asked me if I truly I thought I could continue to come up with “legitimate” excuses for not visiting the in-laws at Christmastime for the next twenty-plus years. I had to give in and admit that avoiding them for yet another Christmas was probably pushing my luck.
After all, when A. last visited his family my excuse for staying home was that I had to take care of the cats… which wouldn’t have been all that bad of an excuse except for one thing: In the past when we have gone for a visit I have just packed up the cats and taken them with us!