Aunt Refuses To Comply With Child’s Extravagant Christmas List: “It’s Completely Insane”

Big, family Christmas parties can be a lot of fun but are often pretty heavy on the wallet if you end up getting presents for everyone. But even worse, there are sometimes family members who see the holidays as the perfect time to fleece their relatives under the guise of “giving gifts.”

A woman shared her experience with a deeply entitled couple in her family, who would ask for expensive Christmas gifts for their daughter, only to keep them for themselves. Instead of actual presents for a child, they would request collector's items that their daughter wouldn’t even be allowed to touch.

Giving gifts is easy, selecting them is the hard part. In a vacuum, you simply pick something the person likes, buy it, wrap it, and make a nice card if you are feeling fancy. In the real world, we not only have to balance budgets but our own time, energy, and gifts of other people as well. After all, getting one person at the event a lovely gift and then getting something considerably worse for someone else often can feel bad. This is why many company “Secret Santa” events have strict rules about the price of a gift.

At the same time, it might be particularly hard to pick out a gift for someone you don’t quite know as well. Perhaps a distant relative, a coworker, or the new partner of a friend. “Generic” gifts can seem strange, but more “specific” gifts are risky, as you don’t know what they own, want, or need.

This is perhaps why, as one gains wisdom with age, the wishlist seems so much more appealing. After all, not only can you both ensure you get something you actually want, but you can still maintain some degree of surprise by simply having a large wishlist with lots of options. This way, you still don’t know exactly what you are opening on Christmas day.

At the same time, it’s also an absolute godsend when doing your Christmas shopping. After all, some years, you are getting gifts for so many people that it’s easy to run out of mental energy to pick things. A list is a great way to help others and ultimately help yourself, but it suffers from a few social risks. Firstly, some folks see a wishlist as rude, like a set of demands put out by a greedy person.

For example, William Hanson, a London-based etiquette expert, has stated that “Christmas lists make life so much easier, especially for the hard-to-buy-for. But, it is not correct etiquette to issue your list unless asked.” It goes without saying that if a group is going to be exchanging gifts, which tends to mostly happen around Christmas time depending on where you live, it’s best to settle on whether you will have wishlists in advance.

Unfortunately, in families where this is more normal, for example, OP’s, this sort of behavior might end up weaponized. Bit by bit, the value of the requested items grows and people don’t really notice. After all, with inflation and many different Christmas expenses coming up, it’s easy to lose track. The real issue here, however, isn’t the cost of the gifts. If no one could afford them, no one would buy them. Instead, they are using their kid to get things for themselves. At the cost of their relative's resources and their child's actual Christmas gifts.

Fortunately, OP has the right idea. If her cousin is going to hijack the idea of a wishlist, it seems well within her rights to use some social norms to get around it. After all, how exactly can the cousin protest what is clearly a gift for a child, when, technically, that is what they requested? If the rest of the relatives follow suit, they might hopefully amend this habit.

However, it’s just as important that OP and any others who follow her somehow communicate exactly why they are no longer financing these folk’s hobbyist collections. After all, entitled people tend to not exactly get why people don’t accept their delusions, so subtlety often doesn’t work.