5. Your Passive Aggression Will Keep You Warm
Years ago, my stepmother disapproved of my (then) boyfriend. Leading up to Christmas that year my father kept asking me for a family picture of me, my boyfriend and our infant daughter. I ended up sending him the picture we took with Santa, where I was knealing on one side of Santa with our daughter on my knee and my boyfriend on the other side of him. Come Christmas Day, my stepmother gifts me a giant threadbare blanket (the kind you buy at the Walmart photo counter) with the Santa picture splashed across it in all it’s cross-stiched splendor, except that she had cropped the photo to just have me, my daughter and rando Santa Claus in it, no boyfriend. The way she had cropped the picture onto the blanket made it so that our depictions on it were easily 5 times the size of us which made it obvious that she could have fit the entire picture. My daughter’s nostrils were easily the size of my fists. As I was trying to hide my incredulity after opening it she said, “It would look nicer but you didn’t really give us a good picture,” which was really the cherry on top. This blanket has been known ever since as “The Passive Aggressive Blanket.”