Each Christmas it’s a stressful time for my family. My father reliably becomes passive aggressive, I suspect because he wants Christmas to be a certain way, with certain foods to his liking. The problem is that he is old school and does nothing at all to help with the monumental task of preparing. Therefore I tend to help my mum cook things we like, as we are the ones putting in the effort.
My brothers and father do nothing to help – yet resent not getting what they want. It feels as though it gets more toxic and difficult each year – and we don’t know how to make it better. Any suggestions? Also, self-reflection on the part of my dad will never happen, so we’re at an impasse.
Eleanor says: Passive aggression is such mean theatre. It imposes an agenda just as surely as regular aggression, since it predictably commands our attention: “Was that what he wanted? Did that go wrong?”
But by not quite voicing complaints, it also maintains the appearance of martyrdom. What a weaselly thing to do, to secure the effects of aggression, while getting the credit for passivity. If you’re going to dominate people, at least own up to it!
One way to short-circuit passive aggression is to resolutely ignore it. Passive aggression works by pushing you into a guessing game: Why are they reacting like that? What could I have done differently? By making you wonder, the other person secures your attention without having to own up to wanting it.
You could try to block this with a personal rule: “If Dad and my brothers are not going to say what they’d like or take steps to bring it about, they’re not going to get my attention.” When you feel your focus being yanked to what they want and how they feel, try to call it back, perhaps by asking whether they’re giving your feelings reciprocal attention.
This strategy can be really hard. It’s difficult to set aside the unpleasantness of harumphs and grimaces, especially if years of those harumphs have you in the habit of speculating about their cause.
So perhaps you could also try to change the Christmas ritual. Traditions can go stale: the repetition of the choreography of fun sometimes just emphasises how little fun is actually in the room, like how a strained candlelit dinner can be more tragic than no candles at all.
New plans might make room for new dynamics. You could go to a Chinese restaurant, play cricket instead of cooking, or contrive an invitation to someone else’s celebration, where your Dad and brothers might feel less entitled to having their private expectations fulfilled. If bad habits have been worn into your Christmas traditions, changing that ritual might change those habits.
But, if you’ll permit me, I think there’s a bigger point in the background of your letter. You write that personal reflection from your Dad will never happen. This feels louder to me than the specificities of Christmas. If you’re upset by what he’s doing, why doesn’t that upset him? I don’t know the answer and, of course, I don’t know the rest of your relationship. But at the moment you seem to have confidence that your Dad wouldn’t care that he’s spoiling Christmas for his wife and child. It’s worth not just blowing past that like any other yuletide annoyance.
There is such poignant hope wrapped up with the holiday season. We go back home, we revisit the rituals of childhood. We allow ourselves a bauble-delicate vision of how things could be. But if your pessimism here is well-placed – if he really wouldn’t be upset to know that Christmas is stressful for you, nor want to change it – you might want to be deliberate about how much hope you continue to invest.
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