Woman Doesn't Want to Use In-Laws' Christmas Money the Way They Intended, but Worries About Upsetting Them, Too
In a Reddit post, the woman writes that she wants to come clean with her in-laws "that this is what we are doing with their gift money"
A woman says she is frustrated by her mother-in-law's insistence that she and her husband use their monetary Christmas gifts in a very specific way.
As she explains in a Reddit post. the woman has been married to her husband for nearly eight years, and the couple has three kids under the age of 7.
"My husband’s family lives a 4 hour flight from us and in a location that is very difficult to travel to at Christmas time so it’s long been established that we don’t travel to them at Christmas time, and there are no hard feelings about this at all," she shares.
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Since they aren't together, the woman's mother-in-law sends a check to the couple each year, asking them to use it to purchase gifts for their family on her behalf.
"We always use this money for gifts for the kids, and we always tell the kids that those gifts are from their grandparents," the woman adds. "Honestly because it’s a lump sum it has been really great to get a larger ticket gift for them to share (as an example, we used it one year to buy them a Nugget play couch - something we otherwise wouldn’t have given them as a gift)."
But a couple of years ago, the woman's mother-in-law "clarified that the money is also intended to be enough for my husband and I to buy gifts for each other 'from them.' "
"This is honestly just lower priority for us, and we told her one year that we don’t need much for ourselves and had just used the money for the kids," she writes. "My MIL wasn’t thrilled about this, and then last year when we were on FaceTime on Christmas morning, she asked us directly what gifts we had gotten each other from them. We both improvised and showed gifts that we had just bought for each other and went through a bit of a show of thanking them for these gifts. It felt a little silly."
This year, the couple decided that they wanted to use the money to enroll their kids in ski camp, with the woman noting that the check will almost exactly cover the cost.
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"I would just like to be honest with my in-laws that this is what we are doing with their gift money, instead of pretending that my husband and I are using it to get each other gifts too," she writes, adding that she is worried that if she doesn't at least pretend to have used the money to buy her husband a gift, his parents will be upset.
Commenting on the post, Reddit users say the woman should at least pretend to play along.
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"Just pick a present each year that you gave each other and pretend it came 'from them.' It's not even really false, if you think about it since money is fungible. i.e. you could just as easily say that you used the in-law's money to cover most of the cost for the ski camp, and you pitched in the rest, and that they 'bought' you the other thing," writes one commenter.
The commenter adds: "This is what my family does and it's always been easy enough, and I think it makes them happy to think me and my partner are enjoying ourselves as well. Basically, it's a minor ask to let them preserve the happy fiction, so I don't really see the need to push them on it."
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