It always felt like a photocopied Merry Christmas to me. It was never very personal and I'd known them my entire life!
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Add me to the list of "don't waste a stamp sending me one" I'd love to receive one where they tell how the year really went for them. Little Susie was expelled from yet another nursery school, Our 10 year old was aquitted on all arson charges but dashed his dreams of becoming a firefighter, Grandma and Grandpa have moved into a swinging seniors complex.....give me something to relate to.
Sometimes, you've just got to learn to lighten up and laugh at ridiculous people, braggarts and prevaricators being numbered among those people.
I guess you could always start a new family tradition of who can create the most ridiculously fictictious letter.
Make lemonade, people, make lemonade!!
(Of course, I guess if you are feeling especially crabby, you could mark the envelope "Addressee Unknown" and drop it back in the mailbox on the corner, or just hit "Delete" when you see their email address.)
Prhoshay, I did just that one year. I wrote that if this had been a typical year, I would be telling them that my daughter had done well in 6th grade and that my business was doing well, but that this was not a typical year as we hit the lottery in July. Yes, the BIG TIME. It went on and on and on about building houses around the world, having Izack Perlman giving my daughter violin lessons. It was over the top ridiculous. The funny thing? Everyone got it but my husband's family and they called wanting to borrow money. It was a scream. I got great satisfaction in telling those losers that it was a JOKE.
The next year was the Enron Scandel and I wrote that one saying "Easy come, easy go, we had invested with Enron and it was ALL gone."
And it's not jealousy, she deserves everything she's got, just be a little more humble about it. She's "new" money and it shows. If you're lucky enough to have that right now great. But don't come across as the biggest snob on the planet and that's exactly how it comes across.
If it's truly news, then I don't mind the letters. I got one from a friend and it was great to catch up on her kids. One is graduating from college this year and I didn't know that. So that one was fine. The one from the one family member is just so damn pretentious that it makes me gag. She actually wrote last year about their new "McMansion" complete with photos of it. Yes, it's a McMansion, but who calls it that except a pretentious snob that is rubbing it in.
Laugh, mrd, laugh!! I think they would be more irritated if you just totally ignored them or laughed in their faces! Don't waste your precious energy on them.
Isn't calling it a McMansion acknowledging that it is a steaming pile of architecturally and aesthetically suspect crap? That's what the appellation always meant to me. If she is calling her home a McMansion as way of highlighting her superiority, then she is tasteless and dimwitted as well as being pretentious.Originally Posted by myrosiedog;3255374;
ETA: Yes, yes, I have been called out in the past (on another site entirely) for being pretentious because I use the fancy words. However, I don't consider using fancy words to be pretentious - I consider having the ability to use the fancy words but not using them to be condescending.
I know exactly the sort of letter that MRD is talking about. We used to get one too, and somehow it used to find itself subjected to staged read-alouds. And then there were the jokes about the years they waited to send their cards until afterhad been accepted early decision to , following in their parents' footsteps. Most of them are fine-- nice to "catch up" but this one was really over the top.
Here's Wikipedia's definition of McMansion: McMansion is a term coined by society to describe a particular type of housing that is constructed in an assembly line fashion reminiscent of food production at McDonald's fast food restaurants. The term is one of many McWords. A McMansion often denotes a home with a larger footprint than a median home, an indistinct architectural style similar to others nearby, and is often located in a newer, larger subdivision or replaces an existing, smaller structure in an older neighborhood.
Many of these house-on-steroids have popped up in our town and neighboring towns, usually replacing nice, normal sized houses, and frankly around here, the term is invariably used with an air of condescension. Rattus is pretty accurate as well. You would never hear an inhabitant referring to it as such, so it's kind of funny that she is. But then, from what I can tell of the inhabitants, most of them will let their starter castles (or as my dad calls them, monuments to themselves) do the talking for them, or drop hints of pretension in there without being so in-your-face about it... "Yes, Muffy and I must get the pool house renovated this spring" or "We're adding blahblahblah projection equipment to the media room this winter and you simply have to come see it when it's finished." Never "we moved into our McMansion this year." Not ever. Can you tell that we're sick of them too?
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