Family traditions are a huge deal. Unless they’re flawed in some fundamental way, you probably shouldn’t mess with them. After all, they’re the best way to bond with your family, especially if it’s a family you just married into.
A woman on Reddit who goes by TARRAFs opened up about her own family tradition, which she refused to change for the sake of her daughter-in-law. But now, the DIL and the woman’s son are upset, claiming that the Reddit user made things uncomfortable for everyone. So, she asked the AITA community if she really was in the wrong, or if her son/DIL were.
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The User Shares Her Story.
OP Has Had A Tradition For Years
For the past decade, OP has had a tradition where, on the first Saturday of June and December, she cooks a traditional Brazilian stew called feijoada. Family and friends come over to eat the stew and have been enjoying it every time OP makes it.
This year, OP’s DIL asked if she could help make the stew. The DIL is an aspiring chef, and when they made it in June, she would constantly try to tell OP how to make it (a dish she’d been making for years at this point). After that, OP made the decision to not enlist her DIL’s help again.
When December rolled around, OP’s son asked if OP could move the date of her get-together, as DIL decided she wanted to make the feijoada on the first Sunday of the month. OP refused to change her decision, though. Most people went to OP’s Saturday get-together, but few went to the Sunday one. OP says that feijoada is a dish not many eat two days in a row, which would explain why very few people went to the DIL’s get-together.
OP claims that the problem was never DIL making the dish, but the fact that she tried to hijack OP’s tradition. Even still, the son and DIL claim that OP made things “awkward” for them.
For The Most Part, Commenters Sided With OP.
Most everyone agreed that it sounded like the DIL was trying to upstage OP.
The DIL Came Across As Very Pretentious.
She seems to think she knows more than OP and tried to use OP’s own tradition as a way to prove herself right.
The son is also to blame, here. Instead of trying to get his wife to understand OP’s tradition, he simply let her try to hijack it.
There Was No Pretense Of ‘Bonding’ With The Family.
The DIL claimed she wanted to bond with the family by recreating the dish. But if that were truly the case, as many argued, she could’ve picked a different weekend or even a different month entirely.
