So, it’s your first Christmas as a couple and your partner’s family insists you both come out for the holidays. No point in trying to use Covid to get out of this one — you’re in for the long haul. At this point, the best thing you can do is simply to prepare yourself for the unbridled gauntlet of weirdness that is any family’s festive traditions. Traditions like…
All they serve for dinner is bananas.
Every family does their Christmas dinner a little differently. Some gather around the table to a baked ham or a festive goose, but your partner’s only seems to serve green bananas soaking in some sort of murky fruit gravy for dinner. Best not to be rude, peel the bananas the way their mom tells you to, and just accept you’re going to be shitting pure potassium until the New Year.
You can only open presents after you’ve arm wrestled grandma.
From what you’ve heard, before the family descends on the present pile like a bunch of starving jackals on a gazelle carcass, everyone has to pretend to lose an arm-wrestling match to your partner’s ninety-seven-year-old grandmother. It’s cute, but also a pretty strange situation for you. When it’s your turn, whatever you do, just be gentle. If you use too much force it’s only gonna make things weirder when you break every bone in her frail, nonagenarian arm.
Guess who died this year.
Whenever you get enough elderly extended family together you will inevitably have to hear about which of their friends didn’t make it through the year. However, you’ve never seen it done with an actual points system and score sheets, and apparently, there’s a bonus round somehow. It’s pretty metal, but maybe you need to reconsider if this is truly the person you want to spend your life with after this one.
When their father dresses up like a salmon and rolls around in the yard for twenty minutes.
Well, that certainly got abstract fast. Like, is it supposed to be a metaphor? Are you supposed to join in? Just sneak off for a cigarette and try not to think about how this tradition began in the first place.
Something they all keep referring to as “the winter spider hunts in the moonlight.”
If you made it this far then good news, you’re really in love. The bad news is your partner’s entire family is now wearing electrified boxing gloves and something in that cage they have covered with a towel is humming Victorian nursery rhymes. Get used to it, we guess. You’re part of the family now!