AITAH for ruining family Christmas?

Names have been changed to protect the good, the bad, and the ugly. Strap in because it’s a long one. 

Family info for background:

My grandpa has three daughters: Amy, Ana, and Tina. Amy has 1 daughter, Regina, who has 2 kids of her own. Ana has two kids, me and my brother Damian. Tina has 1 kid, Kevin, who also has two kids of his own. 

I (24NB) have a very conflict avoidant extended family. Growing up, I watched as my parents navigated hardships brought on by family members while refusing to actually talk to the one at fault because they didn’t want to rock the boat. Any time something does get brought up, it becomes a huge deal and family holidays get cancelled. This has happened on multiple occasions, most of which occurring before I was alive or could remember.

My cousin Regina (27F), is not the nicest person around. The conflict avoidance must have skipped her or something, because she acts just plain hateful and rude at times. You can’t just say that someone is hateful and rude without giving examples, though, so here are some that come to mind.

• While we helped our aunt Tina out with planning a baby shower for her first grandchildren, Regina made a point of telling her that the banner she’d purchased from a friend looked terrible and that she shouldn’t have paid money for it. Then, when Tina told Regina she was being rude, she walked over to where I was setting up decorations and relayed the whole conversation to me, expecting me to take her side. I told her she was, in fact, being rude. 
• She had a plan to be induced into labor for one of her children, and then a cousin on the other side of her family happened to give birth to her child on the same day. Regina does not speak to that other cousin to this day because she’s so offended that the kids have the same birthday.
• We went on a mission trip (I’ve since realized these are bad, but I was a child and my parents were going so I didn’t have a choice) and she made comments about how gross/dirty the children we were serving were. 
• I made a road trip to set up and attend her baby shower only to find that, while we were setting up, she was complaining to other members of our family about how it was going to be a “shit show” because we were the ones doing it.
• Her parents (Amy & Dan) booked a cruise for the two of them and even purchased an additional wifi package so they could FaceTime her and her children while they were away. Regina is historically notorious for pawning her kids off on her parents, to the point that she can’t discipline her oldest herself and has to FaceTime her mom to have her do it for her. While her parents were away on their cruise, Regina sent me a rant about how she wished her parents would stop sending her pictures because it was unfair that “they left [her] here alone with their grandkids.” 

Another piece of background information you need is that Regina has a photography side hustle. She mainly shoots weddings and similar events, and she did both my and my brother’s high school senior pictures.

So now that you have a little bit of the background I’m working with here, I can explain how everything went to shit and our family imploded.

A couple years ago, my brother Damian (M22) got engaged to his fiancee Janis (F21) and became the first member of our generation to plan a wedding. Regina is married but had a courthouse ceremony while eight months pregnant with her oldest, so she never had a wedding to invite family to. He got engaged about a month before Thanksgiving, so that was the next family event where everyone got together.

Very shortly after Regina got to dinner, she pulled Damian and Janis aside and told them that her wedding gift to them would be photographing their wedding for free. To my recollection, she didn’t really even ask, or if she did, she did in a way that assumed they would accept. Unbeknownst to her, they had already picked a photographer, one of Janis’s family friends who has taken pictures for her her whole life. 

Now, FWIW, my brother and I both have good reason to not want her to photograph our weddings. When she did our senior pictures, we both came away from the experience unhappy. In my case, she took weeks to get pictures back and then only returned 4-5 shots from multiple hours of shooting. In his, she didn’t take any extra care to accommodate the fact that he hates getting his picture taken. So neither of us had great experiences using her photography in the past.

To Damian’s credit, though, he actually declined pretty politely. I believe he told her that one of their friends was going to do it. Totally reasonable thing to say, and had she asked any follow up questions, I truly hope she would have felt that they were justified in picking the photographer they did. 

Instead, Regina freaked tf out. Her tone got louder and she had this crazy look in her eye. She immediately turned to me and my partner and said “Well since Damian doesn’t want me to do his wedding, I’ll shoot YOURS for free.” It’s hard to write tone into text, but she definitely came off as offended and angry. 

We also had our own conflict that holiday, because god forbid I get excluded. I had mentioned in the past that I’d tried to learn crochet but could never get the hang of it. At one point in the evening, Regina accosted me, bag of yarn and needles in hand, and said “You’re gonna learn to crochet tonight.” Again, not a question. To my credit, I went along with it and gave a good faith attempt to learn from her. But when she kept harshly criticizing my techniques without offering helpful corrections, I had to give up the ghost. It was genuinely an emotional experience for me - Regina got to learn to crochet from our grandma, who was the kindlest, gentlest, most patient presence I’ve ever known. Hearing her teach and correct me like that when I knew she got to learn from our grandmother stung. I told her I didn’t think I could get the hang of it right then and I might try again later.

I probably should have told her then and there why the crochet thing made me so upset, but my grandma is a really sore spot for me with Regina. Like I mentioned above, my grandma was a very kind, amazing woman who very rarely had an unkind word to say. Since her passing, Regina only ever has two things to say to me about her. 

The first is a story about when we went to visit our great-grandmother for her birthday. Regina decided to make our great-grandma a pillow, which our grandma was helping her to sew. I was young and was apparently acting up, so my grandma snapped at me to sit down at one point. I literally don’t remember this happening at all, but Regina loooooves relaying how grandma never yelled at anyone and that’s the one time she ever heard her raise her voice, to scold me. 

The second is a complaint she has about a blanket our grandma was in the process of making her when she passed away. Regina had asked her to make a t-shirt quilt out of all her old high school cheer shirts. My grandma reassured her a couple times that it was nearly done, but after she passed, we found it in pieces and nowhere near finished. Around the same time, my grandma had also been crocheting me a mermaid blanket that I’d been asking for. I was lucky that it happened to be more finished by the time she was gone, and even luckier that one of grandma’s church friends was able to finish it for me. 

Any time we get to talking about grandma, Regina has to bring one or both of those stories up, which just isn’t fair. I lived hours away from our grandma until high school, while Regina got nearly unlimited time with her when grandma would pick her up every day after school. It feels cruel and like she wants to diminish the love our grandma had for me after she’s gone. So I wasn’t fully honest and didn’t tell her why I was so upset during her crochet “lesson.”

After she got home from Thanksgiving, I guess Regina called her mom Amy (F54) to complain that she feels like no one wants her around. (Important note here: she said she felt that way at both of her family gatherings, both the family I’m a part of and the one I’m not, so I am not the common denominator here.) She specifically told her mom that the interaction between her and Damian “felt weird.” 

After that, Amy called my mom, Ana (F50) to ask her to talk to Damian and I about patching things up with Regina. Unfortunately, on that call my mom relayed some of the things we’ve told her about the way Regina treats us and others. I’m not sure at all how she went about that, but Regina has since said that she heard that the reasons Damian declined her picture offer was because she was mean, which is not the full truth of the situation. So I’m pretty sure my mom made things messier. 

In early December, my mom reached out to Damian and me via text to ask us if we would consider reaching out to talk to Regina. We weren’t sure how to approach that at all (like, hey your mom told my mom that you think I’m mad at you????), so we came to the consensus that if Regina had a problem, she could bring it to us, since we’re all adults over 20.

Spoiler alert: She never did. 

At Christmas that year, I did make more of an effort to talk to her. If I recall, we managed to have a relatively pleasant conversation or two that night, though I don’t remember what about. 

The next time we all got together was for Easter. Our aunt Tina was out of the country on vacation, so it was just Amy and Dan’s family, our family, and our grandfather. While we were all there, a tornado warning went into effect that forced us all to go over to the storm shelter next door to my parents’ place. Regina was a little panicked when we first sheltered, so someone suggested a game of Hangman. We played a couple of rounds, then Regina started putting in phrases making fun of our absent aunt Tina, which lifted her spirits quite a bit (remember the hateful & rude thing?). That hour or so of playing Hangman with her is the only time I’ve seen her in a sunny disposition since Damian got engaged. 

I didn’t see her for several months after that, so I heard about this next part through texts and calls with my mom and my brother.

In late June, Damian and Janis printed and started to hand out wedding invitations. To save on postage, they hand delivered as many as they could. When they gave Amy her own invitation, they also passed off the invitation for Regina’s family, since Amy had to go drop Regina’s kid off anyways. Amy got to Regina’s house, handed her the invitation, and Regina, without opening or looking at the invite, just said “Return to sender.” She didn’t want to take the time to even open up the card and check “decline.”

I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that maybe she really did have something going on on the day of the wedding. I thought that would have been weird since she so aggressively offered to photograph the wedding, but hey, things can come up.

Nope. She confirmed to her mom (who confirmed to my mom) a week later that she wasn’t going because she was offended over her photography offer not being accepted. 

At this point, I was livid. Damian is easily the kindest, most drama-free, most responsible, most has-his-head-on-his-shoulders out of all four of us cousins, and the only thing he’s ever done to personally affront Regina is pick his wife-to-be’s family friend to shoot his wedding. I was (and still am) angry that she would choose to act this way toward him.

Damian himself actually wasn’t that upset. He rationalized it away with “Well, at least we won’t have to deal with her drama at the wedding.” Janis was more upset, but Damian discouraged her from speaking to Regina because of how explosive Regina can be. Damian knew how angry I was with her, and he specifically asked me not to say anything to her until after the wedding, because, as he put it, “she could still crash it.”

I respected his wishes and didn’t say anything, but it also drove me absolutely insane. It seemed like every time I opened up Facebook or Instagram, the first post I would see would be from her about her photography business or something else. It got to the point where I was about to explode, so I unfriended her (this comes back later). It wasn’t the most mature choice I could have made, but I wasn’t sure how else to cope with not being able to vent my feelings to her. 

About two weeks out from the wedding, Regina’s oldest kid decided they wanted to go to the wedding. Amy went to Damian and Janis to ask permission, and they were genuinely scared to allow it at first because they thought Regina might be angry for her child attending. Amy assured them that it was fine and that Regina had already given permission. The kid wanted to go because they’re obsessed with Janis (as they should be! She is fantastic and kind and patient and sweet and excellent with children). 

The wedding was in October and went amazingly. Janis looked beautiful and Damian looked so happy, and everyone who was there had a great time, including Regina’s oldest. Dare I say it, the pictures even came out perfectly. In all honesty, Damian was probably right - the night probably was better for her not being there, because there was absolutely zero drama or nonsense. 

My partner and I had our 4 year anniversary on the 25th, and we ended up getting engaged 10 days before that on the 15th. It was a really beautiful moment, and we’re really excited to get married!

It brought on near immediate anxiety about Regina, though. The whole week after getting engaged, it was like I was having flashbacks to her grabbing me and forcibly offering to shoot my wedding for free. I started getting sick at the thought of seeing her at Thanksgiving. I actually asked my parents not to share the news with her so I could have a conversation with her prior to the holiday. I intended to tell her I would not be having her shoot my wedding and to explain my reasoning behind it.

Which, I suppose, I should explain here. Obviously, yes, I’m upset with her for how she treated Damian. And I don’t like her general demeanor/the way she treats people. And I didn’t have good experiences from the times she’s photographed me in the past. Above all of that, though, is her photography style. She produces heavily edited digital photos, which is what some people want. I really want raw film photography at my wedding, though, and she just doesn’t do that. And while I know that’s a good reason, she responded so terribly to Damian’s perfectly good reasoning that I was expecting some insane social fallout. 

I ended up texting her about a week before Thanksgiving asking if she’d be at the family dinner. She replied that she wasn’t sure yet and was still deciding whether she’d be there or at her husband’s family gathering. 

I was cowardly, which I can admit now. I didn’t want to have this conversation with her, and I kind of hoped she would just not be at Thanksgiving and I could put it off. So when I talked it over with my fiancee and the idea that it might be pretentious to text her before she offered came up, I was eager to jump on it and not have the conversation at all. That was a mistake and I should have talked to her then. Truly I should have talked to her, like, three years ago, but I didn’t.

Later that month, our family hosted Thanksgiving dinner again. Leading up to the holiday, I expressed to my mom how truly upset I was that Regina not only skipped the wedding but sent her kid for a night of free food & childcare. I also expressed to her that I didn’t feel like wasting paper to send her an invitation to my wedding, and that I was not looking forward to her asking any questions about my engagement. At this point, I was dreading seeing her because of all the drama. She asked me several times not to say anything to her, even taking a second to pull Damian and me aside as dinner was starting to remind us not to say or start anything. 

So we didn’t talk to her at all that night. I had nothing nice to say, and I don’t think Damian did either, so it’s not like we had conversations to start with her anyway. From the other room, I could hear her screaming at her kid for wanting to play a game with her and snipping at other family members when they asked her about her job, which made me want to talk to her even less. My family just doesn’t yell at each other or talk to each other in a rude tone like she does, so I’m not comfortable being around it or interacting with her when she’s like that. So my options on Thanksgiving were to be honest and bring up my issues with her, be disingenuous and be friendly with her while acting like nothing is wrong, or avoiding her and not talking to her. I can’t stand placating people who have hurt my feelings, and my mom was very clear about not saying anything confrontational, so I just didn’t talk to her. 

Every other family member came up to me during Thanksgiving to congratulate me on my engagement, including Regina’s mom, Amy, so I know Regina knew about it at that point. I’m not mad at her for not saying anything, because I never directly told her, but it’s important that you know that she knew. 

Unbeknownst to me at the time, Amy had had to practically beg Regina to come to Thanksgiving. Regina felt like no one wanted her there and like no one liked her, but her mom finally convinced her to go. After my brother and I didn’t talk to her at dinner, she decided she wouldn’t be coming to Christmas. I, of course, had none of this context when I decided to do what I did next.

My immediate family got together in mid December for a small family holiday tradition, during which I broke down in tears to my mom about how much I was dreading extended family Christmas. I really felt like I was in an impossible situation. I’ve been in therapy for years, largely focusing on how to shake off some of the negative influences my family and upbringing have had on me. I was finally comfortable having difficult conversations with people when they hurt my feelings, and it felt like I had to backslide every time I came home to visit family. It got to a point that was so distressing that I felt like I had to choose between being an unhealthy, masked version of myself and cutting my family off entirely. Family gatherings were genuinely that painful. 

When I told my mom all of that, she encouraged me to call Regina before Christmas. She made it clear that she would never confront someone in the family like that, because she’s gone down that road before and knows how it goes, but she wanted me to try to work things out with her. This time, I was determined to follow through on talking to her because I realized after Thanksgiving that avoiding her at every holiday was going to make everyone involved miserable. 

I think it’s important to keep in mind as we venture forward into the story that Regina asked her mom to ask my mom to ask Damian and I to call her and talk things out. She literally asked for this. 

I texted Regina the next day, December 15, to ask her if we could call sometime before Christmas. She agreed and we set a call for a few days later. 

The call did not go very well. I started by telling her that I was uncomfortable at family functions, and had heard that she’d been too. I told her that she and our relationship were a big part of why I was so uncomfortable. I listed out reasons for that, like how she reacted to Damian and Janis, like how she was harsh and mean when teaching me to crochet, like how she acted at the baby shower, and, more pressing than anything, how I was worried there was going to be a huge brouhaha over my engagement. 

She acknowledged that she knew Damian and I thought she was mean. She said that she really didn’t see how she’d ever been mean or rude, and that she always had good intentions. She asked how she was so mean and so rude if she had a husband and multiple friends. I told her that I did think she was probably more stressed out at family functions, just based on the way she interacts with her oldest kid at them, but I tried to make a point that I was just trying to talk about our relationship, not her relationships with other people. She said that Damian and I are the only people who find her rude, so she just couldn’t see it. I pointed to the baby shower example, mentioning that even Tina called her rude in that moment, truly just trying to get her to see how her actions affect other people.

I tried to emphasize that I do care about her, and I really do. Regina and I went to the same high school, and we used to be very close. It makes me genuinely sad that our relationship is in its current state and that I’m anxious, rather than excited, to share my engagement with her. I reiterated that I love her and the reason I’m even bringing any of this up is because I want our relationship to get better and for us to be able to speak to each other again. 

She never really apologized. She kept saying that she wouldn’t water herself down for me or Damian. At one point, she said she thought that we were just too sensitive and couldn’t handle the way she jokes around. I was receptive to that, even. I told her that was fair, and that I should ask what her intentions are when she says things that rub me the wrong way, rather than assuming and getting offended. At one point when she was saying again that she just can’t see times when she’s been rude or mean, I offered in good faith to point out those moments to her so we could start getting past these issues. Like I was genuinely trying to find a solution and make things better. She said at the time that she would be okay with those things, even though her tone didn’t really match what she was saying.

Near the end of the call, she started saying that she didn’t feel like she could “play nice,” and come to Christmas. She said she needed to take some time with her family and process things. I told her I could understand that, that I hoped she could think on what I’d said and that we could fix our relationship. She snapped that she’d try to think about the consequences of what she says, and I told her that was honestly all I was asking for, and then the call ended. 

Unbeknownst to me, Regina had Amy sitting next to her for the entire phone call, which she had on speakerphone. Immediately after our call ended, Amy called Tina to tell her what had happened. Tina, whose son had recently had her first grandchildren, said she didn’t want drama at their first Christmas. The decision was made then and there to cancel the extended family holiday.

I have not spoken to any of my extended family since last Thanksgiving, save for my grandpa. I sent birthday messages to Regina, Amy, and Regina’s husband, and none of them replied to me. My mom and Amy apparently didn’t talk for a month or two, but now they’re back on speaking terms. My mom says she just doesn’t talk about “real stuff” with Amy in order to keep the peace and preserve their relationship.

So all of this makes me feel like I’m fucking crazy. My mom doesn’t care enough to stick up for my brother and me with her sister. Apparently I’m the only person in my family who can’t just pretend everything’s fine and paint on a fake smile for family gatherings. I feel like what I did shouldn’t make me an asshole, but the way my entire family’s acting like I shat in the Christmas ham is making me second-guess myself. So… am I the asshole here??