This isn’t technically a holiday story, but it fits into the thread and I need to fucking vent...
MIL’s birthday is tomorrow so my wife decided to go to a French bakery in Queens because her mom is a saint. While they were gone, I started looking up places to travel to for next year. After looking at a map, I realized that St. Petersburg is close to Helsinki, a Finnair hub. (Oneworld alliance redeemable with miles...it’s not important) Then it dawned on me that I could take the wife and her mom back to their home city to visit their daughter/sister since MIL is turning 75 and we’re losing the ability to plan that sort of thing. I spent a couple hours mapping things out and found a pretty decent deal. I waited until they got back from shopping and sprung it on the wife. She only halfway acknowledged my idea. I was a little crestfallen, because I thought it was solid and put some effort into it, but I figured she was tired. I brought it up a little later that evening and she said that it wouldn’t be worth it because her sister will probably be here next summer. Before I even prodded her for details, I knew how this was going to go.
Apparently, visa approvals not withstanding, I will be housing her sister, her 18 year old nephew and her 5 year old niece “just for a little while until they can get their own place.” (None of them speak English) The last time I heard that was with her father, who moved out in an urn 9 years later. She and her mom have been coordinating this and it slipped their minds to solicit my thoughts on the matter. Our youngest is moving out to attend college next summer so I was only ONE more relative away from claiming my house back. For some reason, I am trying to figure out how to tactfully tell her that this isn’t going to happen and she can forget about it until the sun burns out.
To make it Thanksgiving related, I will be stuffing her like a turkey in retribution for the foreseeable future because I’m sure I’ll be making the plane reservations using my miles.