Sure, Christmas can be fun when you’re an adult – but that’s nothing compared to when there are kids around.

Through their joy in the holiday season you get to relive what it’s like to be a kid at Christmas, sharing in their unbridled, innocent glee.

So when there’s a child in the family, it’s natural that you want to buy them gifts, and share the holidays with them.

That’s very much the case with the aunt of a young child in this story, who has bought the kid plenty of gifts and cannot wait to see her open them.

When she found out that this Christmas, there would be new rules though, she was understandably upset.

Read on to find out what happened.

AITA for refusing to send all of my niece’s presents to my brother and sister-in-law’s house?

I am a 23-year-old woman, with a niece who is twenty months old.

My brother (29, male) and his wife (29, female) are expecting us to send all of their daughter’s (my niece’s) Christmas presents to their house so they can open them on Christmas morning there.

They said they’d record it for us so we could “watch” her open them – which confused us because for years since my brother was born we would make it a whole family thing.

We open what we get from our parents, and then go to our Gran’s to open presents from everyone else… but they just want every single present at theirs?

Let’s see why this is an issue to the aunt.

But the thing is, some of the gifts I bought – particularly the bigger dollhouses and toys – are staying at my house for niece to open when she visits us.

I don’t want all the gifts leaving our home just to be transported back hours later – it makes no sense to me, and I want my niece to have some gifts with us too.

Plus, my sister-in-law said that all the presents should be intended to stay at their house, which, again I don’t understand as my niece will have plenty to go around.

I thought that keeping two here at my house with my parents (male and female, both 50) would be a good idea for when my niece comes to visit us all, so she has more age appropriate toys.

So she decided to broach the subject with her brother and sister-in-law.

When I told them this, they kept pushing, insisting that everything should be at their house for their “family Christmas morning.”

They even went so far as to text my mum, trying to make it seem like we were upset, when honestly we were just trying to set boundaries.

To be honest, I feel like this has highlighted a bigger problem: my brother and his wife have been distancing themselves from our family for years, choosing to spend almost all of their time with my sister-in-law’s family.

This has made my mum hurt, my dad furious, and me and my sister (19, female) feel like we barely even have a relationship with my brother anymore.

And it has left this aunt feeling really conflicted.

I’m left wondering if I’m wrong for wanting to keep some of my niece’s presents at my house for her to open here, and refusing to be forced into sending everything over for them to control the Christmas morning experience.

My mum is worried that if we try to fight back, my brother and sister-in-law will stop us from seeing my niece ever again.

It’s gotten to the point where I left my sister-in-law saying “right, fine,” And leaving her on read. It’s stressed me out and upset me.

I understand they want family time with her in the morning, but having every present in their house? It just doesn’t make sense to me. I wasn’t brought up like that nor was my brother.

Now, the family are at the point of surrender.

My mum’s given up and has now just finished wrapping up all their presents and put them in a bag ready for her to take them up to their place.

She’s including my brother’s and sister-in-law’s presents too – because if they want my niece’s gifts there, they can have them all at this point.

I’ve done the same: picked out two of the presents for my niece, and I’m saving the rest for her birthday. I gave my mum my brother and sister-in-law’s present to put in the bag.

AITA?

Sure, her brother and sister-in-law want a magical Christmas with their baby, their first where she isn’t an infant. So they might not want to observe all the family traditions that they used to live by, starting their own instead.

But the sad truth is that if all the presents go to their house, the grandparents and the aunts will likely never get the recognition for who the gifts were from.

Which is fine, that’s not why we give gifts – but it does kind of ruin the gift-giving experience for everyone, and will probably lead to them buying fewer things for the kid in future.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit thought about this.

This person thought that really, no one was in the wrong here – they just needed to respect one another and come up with an amicable solution.

But others thought that the aunt’s gift-giving was conditional and selfish.

However, this Redditor thought that she was right to want to see her niece open her gifts, and questioned her brother and sister-in-law’s intentions.

The truth is, the parents get the final say when it comes to what kind of Christmas Day their child has.

But that doesn’t mean that close family members can’t negotiate, and can’t be upset if they don’t get to see the kid open the gifts they’ve lovingly bought her.

All this could be worked out in a compromise, if this family would just talk openly to one another.

If not, their fighting is going to ruin Christmas.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check out what happened when a family gave their in-laws a free place to stay in exchange for babysitting, but things changed when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain.