We recently asked members of the BuzzFeed Community to tell us the wildest family drama that's happened at Christmas. Here are some of their responses.
1.
"So it wasn’t my family, thank god, but one of my friends. Her uncle got caught cheating at the dinner table when his phone buzzed and her aunt saw the incoming text. Started screaming and crying, throwing her dinner at him, etc. My friend dared to laugh, so then her aunt turned on her and started insulting her weight, and how she’d never get a man. So then the mom stands up and starts to yell, and the whole family gets involved. The aunt starts to insult everyone, calling them backstabbers and lowlifes – and then calls me an ‘intruding bitch.’ I’ve never visited a friend over the holidays since."
2.
"The men in my family are all blue-collar guys (truck drivers, warehouse workers, tradesmen) and were always giving sass to my aunt's husband who is a computer-y IT guy. Anyway, one year they gave him a hammer wrapped all up in duct tape. No box, just every inch covered in tape. My aunt's husband threw the hammer down and stormed off and walked out of the house and a mile or so down a very busy main route until my aunt found him walking and picked him up. He sees the humour in it now and it’s all good in the hood."
3.
"When I was a toddler, we were supposed to go to Savannah to visit my mom’s family for Christmas. My dad said he couldn’t go because he lost his wallet. It turned out that some prostitutes he had slept with took his money, identification cards, and all of the cocaine he’d been carrying. We ended up going to Georgia without him. Unsurprisingly, my parents are not together anymore and I’m estranged from my father."
4.
"This happened when I was a little kid so I don’t remember exactly how it started but my three aunts on my mom's side ended up getting in a huge fight, one of them through the phone as she lives far away. While my mom was on the phone with that one trying to calm her down, the other two were running around the house flipping each other off (picture that video of those two guys flipping each other off in the street) and yelling until one of them got so mad she left. My entire family and I were just sitting in the living room watching this go down, needless to say I have never tried so hard not to laugh in my life."
5.
"One year we had extended family Christmas with my mom's side and my aunt (married to my mom's brother) made this HUGE deal about how she had made candles and lotions for all the women from essential oils. My cousin and his wife were leaving early and she just wouldn’t stop talking about how we needed to exchange gifts so she could give all the gals their gifts.
"So we exchange gifts and she hands a bag to every woman there except me and my younger sister. My cousin's girlfriend who we barely knew even got one. It was so painfully obvious that she deliberately didn’t give us something because my mom was given a gift. Sometime in the next year she even had the gall to ask my mom why my sister and I don’t like her as much as other family members."
6.
"A few years back one of my siblings must have ticked my mother off, with all the stress of the past couple of days she just snapped and fully pushed the three-metre Christmas tree over and took a saw to make tiny pieces out of it – true story, and that woman is 5"2."
7.
"My mum was cooking dinner for around 14 of us (family, close friends), so naturally we had to make do with whatever we could as we weren’t used to having this many people for dinner. My mum sets the table and lets everyone know their place and it just so happens that my older sister, who was like 22 at the time, gets a plate that’s different to everyone else’s and she throws a FULL tantrum, and she kicks off enough that my mum is so stressed she spends the rest of dinner throwing up. Safe to say it was an awkward dinner..."
8.
"My grandmother went out to the garage to smoke after Christmas dinner and intentionally slammed her arm in the car door, breaking her wrist in the process. Why? She wanted to see if her pain medication was working. Needless to say, her 'experiment' caused us to spend the rest of Christmas in the emergency room."
9.
"The year was 2012. My family had reached boiling point that year. My brother had been kicked out of the army, I was a 17-year-old stoner about to drop out of school, my parents' marriage was a shit-show and almost ripe for divorce, and my sister was over from the US for the holidays. So you can imagine the mood was already bad enough.
"In the middle of Christmas dinner, the doorbell rings. Who the fuck disturbs a family on Christmas night, you ask? We were thinking the same thing. Without hesitation, my brother gets up from the table and disappears for several minutes.
My father, after a few moments of broiling in his own emotions and changing his face colour to all shades of red, gets up ready to shit on the unknown visitor, and finds my brother dealing weed to him. On Christmas night. You can imagine the drama that ensued. Little did we know that if my brother hadn't gotten up from the table and ensured my father would drive off for hours afterwards, my father would have told us of his year-long affair that night. As well as the child he was about to have with his mistress and that he was planning on leaving the family. So my idiot brother actually saved Xmas by dealing drugs. My father did end up telling us around New Years."
10.
"My brother, who was in town for Christmas with his pregnant wife and toddler, was extremely moody so I called him out on it. Turns out, his wife was/is having an affair that lasted their entire marriage and courtship (eight years plus). He found out about it because for Christmas he gave her a new phone (he’s a tech guy so he was transferring all her information to the new phone and doing backups) and the other man was texting her about how he enjoyed their latest tryst, a week before when she was on a business trip. My brother was devastated and broke down telling me (honestly, who wouldn’t). We’re still not sure of the paternity of the second child and SHE STILL DOES NOT KNOW THAT I KNOW. It’s been one year."
11.
"My mom and my dad's sister have not been fond of each other for over 20 years. Two Christmases ago it finally all came to a head when my six-foot-tall aunt mouthed off to my sweet little 5'1 mom for the last time. My mom knocked her out with one punch! No one in my family is fond of my aunt so we just left her there. Whenever she came through she called the cops, the cops just acted like they were annoyed they were called and called it a family dispute and left."
12.
"My dad and uncle got into a physical fight over who would buy my grandfather a new chair. Dad’s glasses and my uncle's nose were broken."
13.
"My uncle got sent a letter (it got there a little before Christmas) and it was his 18-year-old son that he did not know that he had. He already had two adult daughters and his son also hadn’t heard of him until his 18th birthday. So yeah, he told us at Christmas."
14.
"Growing up we always went to my aunt and uncles house for Christmas Eve dinner. It was usually a full house of about 35 people or more, all family. One Christmas Eve we were all sitting down to dinner when my aunt L (whose house it was) got into an argument with her sister, aunt R. It escalated to the point where they were screaming at each other and my sister, cousins, and I were being herded into the basement to ‘go play or something’.
"It ended when my other aunt (M) yelled that she was sick of the family drama and it was time to come clean. She announced that my oldest cousin was not the biological daughter of Aunt L but was actually R's child. Apparently when R got pregnant she was too young and irresponsible to raise her so L stepped in and took over. You could have heard a pin drop in that moment."