Woman leaves fiance's family Christmas early because of their 'creepy' tradition. AITA?
There's nothing quite like learning the weird ins and outs of a partner's holiday family traditions. Love them or hate them, these traditions can teach you a lot about your partner.
In a popular post on the AITA subreddit, a woman asked if she was wrong for leaving her fiance's family's house in the middle of their weird Christmas traditions. She wrote:
"AITA for not participating in my fiancé's weird Xmas underwear tradition?"
This year, I celebrated Christmas with my fiancé’s family for the first time. Before we went to my fiancé’s parent’s house, my fiancé warned me that his parents usually come short in the amount of food they cook for Christmas dinner and that there’s often not enough for everyone. What I didn’t expect though was to be expected to participate in the family’s weird tradition.
Apparently, they have a longstanding tradition where instead of drawing straws, they’ll throw all their underwear in a bin and then go act take turns wearing a blindfold and drawing a pair of underwear from the pile, and drawing the smallest pair of underwear correlates to drawing the smallest straw.
I had never heard of this tradition, so I felt blindsided when right before Christmas dinner, my fiancés mom yelled out that it was time to « pull the straws » to decide the order of who got to plate up their food first in case there wasn’t enough for everyone. At first, I thought the family was joking when they announced this, so I laughed, which made my fiancé get real defensive.
I volunteered to get my food last, so I wouldn’t have to participate, but my fiancé just got more annoyed and asked me to just try to be a bit more agreeable. The whole thing was just kind of weirding me out, so I called an Uber and went home. Now things are real tense between me and my fiancé, since he now says I made a bad impression by acting like I was too good for their family tradition. AITA?
The internet had a lot to say about this strange tradition.
Papyrus72846 wrote:
Wtf. NTA. This doesn't seem like it could possibly be real but I also don't know how you'd come up with this so I'm inclined to believe you.
It's gross as f#$k to have touch other people's dirty underwear (even moreso when they're not people you're directly related to or particularly close to!).
2. It's weird and embarrassing to have your underwear on display for everyone. Plus, imagine your underwear being the smallest or largest pair. Or having a period stain on it. Or discharge. My in laws should never see my underwear, and I don't know if I'd feel worse about them seeing the tiny sexy ones or the more full coverage ones I wear on my period.
3. They HAVE to know this is a not a normal thing. You could have and should have been warned.
4. This problem could have been easily fixed by them simply making more f$%king food or asking guests to bring a dish to share so there would be enough to go around.
Once again, NTA. I would've noped right out of there too. And if I were you, I would tell your fiance that I AM too good for their family tradition, because it's honestly weird and trashy.
Obi-Juan_Valdez wrote:
Any normal person damned well would be too good for this f#$ked up family tradition. Your fiance needs to know that this isn't remotely sane or acceptable. Tell him we all said it's lunacy. NTA.
skaev0la wrote:
Okay this situation is gold--and an anecdote you can pull out to one-up anybody else's horror in-laws story--as long as you don't actually marry him. Like, there are families out there in the backwoods who only grunt to communicate that would side-eye this clan.
lemon_charlie wrote:
NTA. Even if the underwear was all vigorously washed and dried I wouldn't be keen on handling a random family member's. Reliably not having enough food enough to make any kind of short straw tradition is off, either prepare more food (eating your way through the leftovers until New Year's is itself a tradition), invite fewer people, or ask people to bring a dish with them.
OP is nowhere near TA in this, it's a supremely creepy tradition.