Username Taken wrote:Not my first Christmas, but anyway . . .


A Christmas Story.

For many years here in Cambodia, I had an American brother-in-law married to my wife's younger sister. One Christmas, his parents came over for a visit, and, his Mom was going to cook a traditional western style Xmas Dinner with all the trimmings. We were invited of course, and it all sounded great.

Also invited were the in-laws, Granny, Jed, Ellie-May, Jethro, etc. What could possibly go wrong?

As anyone with a Khmer family knows, when it comes to preparing meals, all the women folk would pitch in to help. Even though they know nothing about what a traditional Xmas dinner was, they just began preparing things in the way that they were used to, which didn't represent anything Christmassy at all.

Things didn't quite go as Mom had planned. Despite there being a table set up for everyone to sit down for dinner, the food started coming out with a plate of sliced turkey, then a plate of vege, then something else, etc.
We ended up eating smorgasbord style with everyone standing around holding their plates. The visiting Dad said, "Not quite what I had in mind, but it'll have to do".

I won't go into details of what happened next, but it resulted in Mom in tears, and both Mom and Dad heading out the front gate vowing never to return.