When it comes to the holiday period, we’ve all got different ideas of how to celebrate.

But once you’ve got kids, it’s quite normal for their enjoyment to become the priority – after all, Christmas is a magical time for kids, and watching them enjoy that magic is a gift in itself.

So when the couple in this story saw that their children’s enjoyment was being hampered by their grandmother’s weird behavior, they decided to take action.

But it really didn’t go down well.

Read on to find out what happened.

AITA for telling my wife’s parents not to bring Christmas Gifts this year?

I am a 39-year-old man, and I have been with my wife (38, female) for seventeen years.

We have two amazing kids (a five-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter).

The issue? My mother-in-law is awful when it comes to Christmas gifts.

Every year, she demands gift lists from the family and then proceeds to ignore them. She thinks she knows us so well that she can do better than what we explicitly ask for.

Uh-oh. Let’s see what makes his mother-in-law such a horrible gifter.

My mother-in-law tends to latch onto a specific gift idea forever. My wife and her sister get yearly gifts featuring things they haven’t liked since their teens.

Another example: we bought our house ten years ago. That year, we mostly just asked for things for the house. She actually did well that year, getting us a set of towels for our bathrooms.

However, she then latched onto ‘towels’ and got us new towels EVERY YEAR FOR THE NEXT SIX YEARS.

When my wife asked her to stop, my mother-in-law got angry and said, “I don’t know what your problem is. You said you liked towels.”

Yikes! This isn’t even the worst of her gifting traits.

She’s also competitive with gifts.

One year I surprised my wife with a trip to Japan. When my mother-in-law found out, she had to show off the necklace that my father-in-law had given her, and bragged about the cruise tickets that she got him, as if she had to one-up her daughter.

These are annoyances we can deal with as adults.

However, this is starting to affect our kids.

Read on to find out exactly how the kids are being affected.

Every year, We spend Christmas morning as just the four of us, with family coming over in the evening.

Two years ago, when they arrived, our son (then three) couldn’t wait to show them his favorite new toy from Santa.

My mother-in-law immediately got jealous over how much he loved this toy and started shoving gifts in his face to try and distract him from it.

While he did enjoy most of them, nothing could top his excitement for his Santa gift. Throughout the day I caught MIL hiding his Santa gift so he would play with the toys she brought instead.

And the repercussions of this are heartbreaking.

Last year, when we said that they were on their way, our son began putting his new toys away in his room. When I asked him why he was doing that, he said he was hiding them because he didn’t want Gramma to take them away.

When they arrived and she gave him her gifts, she began complaining he wasn’t “excited enough” until my wife intervened.

My wife has never loved Christmas (I get why) and I don’t want our kids to feel the same. Our daughter is still too young to be affected, but it’s clearly already getting to our son.

We don’t want to cut my mother- and father-in-law out of Christmas, but want to avoid the issues of my mother-in-law and gifts.

So this year, they decided to take action.

I spoke to my wife about this and she 100% agreed.

So when we went to my mother- and father-in-law’s place for Thanksgiving, we sat down with them while the kids went outside playing with their aunt and uncle, and asked them not to bring presents for Christmas.

But my mother-in-law lost it on us. She ranted that we were “ruining her few Christmases left with her Grandbabies” and said she wasn’t sure they were going to come to Christmas.

We stayed for dinner so the kids could visit with their aunt and uncle who live out of state, but my mother-in-law ignored both my wife and I for the rest of the day.

AITA?

It might suck for this grandmother to not get presents for her grandchildren – and it also might suck for the grandchildren not to receive presents – but her unhinged behavior is clearly having negative effects on everyone.

The children should be free to enjoy Christmas, and the little boy’s anxiety at just five years old is heartbreaking.

He should feel like his toys are safe in his own home, and his grandmother is compromising this safety.

Let’s see what the Reddit community thought about this.

This person agreed that the grandmother’s behavior is completely unacceptable.

While others encouraged the parents to put their children’s Christmas first.

And this Redditor had a great idea for getting rid of the annoying gifts too.

Sure they might be ‘ruining’ the grandmother’s Christmas. But she’s a grown woman, she’ll get over it.

The real issue is the children, for whom Christmas is being ruined thanks to their grandmother’s selfish behavior.

They only get a small number of Christmases as kids – they’re the priority.

She, meanwhile, needs to think about her choices.

If you liked that post, check this one about a guy who got revenge on his condo by making his own Christmas light rules.