It can be satisfying to host a large-scale event, but only once all is said and done—everyone has long gone, and you can finally take a seat and decompress and debrief with the closest friends and family who still remain. All that planning, and coordinating, and executing, and cooking, and cleaning… all that energy and time just to make sure that everyone has had a good time, all of that now behind you, you can finally enjoy it retrospectively.
It really goes without saying that a large event is absolutely exhausting. Especially so when it's with family, since you put all that effort in just to create what is a veritable powder keg waiting to detonate, carefully avoiding topics that will light up the room in all the wrong ways and cautiously disengaging from when those relatives bring up controversial subjects or try to stick to a
It's all glamorous on paper: warm smiles, everyone laughing together, and remembering things that happened years ago, all in the setting of good food and decorations like it's some sort of Hallmark holiday movie.
In this case, after being the de facto host for a great many family holiday events, this woman decided that she was no longer going to shoulder the burden of making everything work for her entire family. She announced that she would not be hosting the next Christmas, giving her family plenty of time to sort out an alternative. They, however, thought that she was being a "grinch" and "cancelling" Christmas, and seemed unwilling and unable to start planning an alternative for themselves.
All anyone else saw was the perfectly executed event, and since everything seemed effortless, they assumed that it was so. Or, maybe they knew more than they were willing to admit to, owing to the fact that nobody else is willing to host. The fact that the entire rest of the family has been blithely unable to organize one gathering without this one member's input speaks volumes to the amount of weight that was being placed on her hosting.
Hosting is, of course, much easier if everyone is willing to chip in and help out. But when the groupthink leads everyone to decide that they can just show up without contributing, it can become a massive burden.
The image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.
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