19 Christmas Horror Stories That Are So Hilariously Bad, Terrifying, And/Or Unthinkably Heartbreaking...No Other Way To Put It
With the holiday season upon us, we decided it was time to ask the BuzzFeed Community to share their worst Christmas horror stories with us. Turns out, a lot of people have had incredibly F'ed up Christmases. Here are the absolute funniest, weirdest, and most utterly HORRIFIC submissions.
ABC / giphy.com
NOTE: Not all entries included are reader submissions.
1."I found out Santa wasn't real not because my parents told me, but because the bike I got from 'Santa' came in a box that my dad left in the garage, and it had a giant picture of the bike I got printed on the side."
2."I was opening presents with my then-boyfriend in front of his huge, religious family. We had been together for some time, and we all thought he was going to propose to me."
"They all waited with bated breath while I opened the tiny envelope from him, that he had 'put a lot of thought into.' The envelope contained…a gift certificate for LASER MOLE REMOVAL. Never once had I expressed any interest in this. I couldn’t decide whether to cry or laugh. We broke up shortly thereafter."
Sony / giphy.com
3."On Christmas Eve in 2019, I was at work, and I got a call from my uncle saying that I needed to go find my dad. His wife of 22 years, my stepmom, was caught in an affair with a coworker, and she had just left him."
"He was an absolute wreck. I threw some of his things in a suitcase, and we drove three-plus hours in a snowstorm on Christmas Eve to take him to my uncle's house (my husband and I didn't have a big enough apartment for him to stay)."
4."After my parents got divorced, they took us on the typical middle-class 'I'm sorry we just separated' vacation. The four of us (Mom, Dad, me, sibling) went to Disney World for Christmas."
"Mom and Dad fought the whole time, and then Dad lost 3-year-old sibling in the park. Sibling was missing for a good 20 minutes, and I think the only reason Mom didn't murder Dad was because we needed the extra body to search for the missing sibling. Fast-forward 25 years, and Dad now takes his new family to Disney World for Christmas. Meanwhile Mom, sibling, and I have never been back."
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5."My uncle got sent a letter (it got there a little before Christmas) and it was from his 18-year-old son that he did not know he had. So yeah, he told us at Christmas."
6."Years ago, I was dating a guy for a few months when Christmas rolled around, so I splurged a bit and got him a GPS to help him find his way. Thoughtful, useful, but not too sentimental; it felt perfect for where the relationship was at the time."
"And he gave me...an MMA magazine. That had clearly been read. I do not like MMA. Not even a little bit. Nor have I ever expressed interest in MMA. Not once. He, on the other hand, loved all things MMA. Trying to move on, I politely thanked him, set the magazine down, and refocused on the next gift. It was a DVD with the cellophane wrapper missing. He got a little quiet, then sheepishly volunteered, 'I, uh, got bored so I watched the movie yesterday.' I slowly responded, 'So… you got me a magazine because you wanted to read it, and then watched the movie you got for me because you were bored?' His only response was, 'Well, yeah, I guess so.' We broke up a week later."
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7."When I was a toddler, we were supposed to go to Savannah to visit my mom’s family for Christmas. My dad said he couldn’t go because he lost his wallet."
"It turned out that some prostitutes he had slept with took his money, identification cards, and all of the cocaine he’d been carrying. We ended up going to Georgia without him. Unsurprisingly, my parents are not together anymore and I’m estranged from my father."
8."I was an RA in college, and the dorms stayed open during Christmas break for the first time ever because so many of the students couldn’t afford to go home."
"I volunteered for Christmas week because the other RAs would have had to cancel plane tickets and my family lived within driving distance. Christmas Eve wound up being the duty shift from hell. There were fights, a room was trashed, cops were called twice, the heater went out, and I did not get to sleep until 6:30 a.m."
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9."So it wasn’t my family, thank god, but one of my friends. Her uncle got caught cheating at the dinner table when his phone buzzed and her aunt saw the incoming text."
"She started screaming and crying, throwing her dinner at him, etc. My friend dared to laugh, so then her aunt turned on her and started insulting her and telling her how she’d never get a man. So then the mom stands up and starts to yell, and the whole family gets involved. The aunt starts to insult everyone, calling them backstabbers and lowlifes – and then calls me an ‘intruding bitch.’ I’ve never visited a friend over the holidays since."
10."My dad's family lives in Canada, so every Christmas, we would fly up there to visit everyone. This time, my brother is about 6, and I'm about to turn 8. Perfect age for traveling nightmares, right? Well, God decides to shit out snow all over the Toronto airport, and we spend eight hours on Christmas Eve trapped inside the airport."
"My brother and I are being horribly bratty because we're hungry and want to open presents and run around. Finally, after the eight-hour delay, we get on our plane and end up back landing around 1 a.m. Now, it's at this point that my mother realizes she has no food at home for us to eat. She's got two starving, up-too-late brats and NO FOOD. The only place open is Waffle House, so we had our Christmas dinner at a Waffle House. The only other people in there? A bunch of drunk mall Santas who told my brother and I that we were being lied to, and this whole Santa thing was a load of bullshit."
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11."My dad and uncle got into a physical fight over who would buy my grandfather a new chair. Dad’s glasses and my uncle's nose were broken."
12."My husband's stepmother gave me, a 36-year-old at the time, a kindergarten-sized backpack for Christmas. When I opened it, she said, 'I actually bought that for (a child) a few years ago and she hated it, so I threw it in a closet and I saw it and thought you’d like it. None of us did; we all think it’s ugly.'"
"That same year, they gave my three kids gifts totaling altogether $15 with the clearance stickers still on them, while her biological granddaughter opened a $300 unicorn. They made sure we knew it cost $300, and then they pointed out our clearance stickers to everyone and what great deals they were (they weren’t), and then they made my kids leave the room so the granddaughter could take pics alone with her unicorn. It was the last Christmas we visited them."
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13."Growing up we always went to my aunt and uncle's house for Christmas Eve dinner. It was usually a full house of about 35 people or more, all family. One Christmas Eve we were all sitting down to dinner when my aunt L (whose house it was) got into an argument with her sister, aunt R."
"It escalated to the point where they were screaming at each other, and my sister, cousins, and I were being herded into the basement to ‘go play or something’. It ended when my other aunt (M) yelling that she was sick of the family drama and it was time to come clean. She announced that my oldest cousin was not the biological daughter of aunt L but was actually R's child. Apparently when R got pregnant, she was too young and irresponsible to raise her, so L stepped in and took over. You could have heard a pin drop in that moment."
14."One Christmas, my brother and father got into a fight, and cops had to be called. My brother was arrested and spent the next three months in jail. Merry Christmas!"
NBC / giphy.com
15."This happened when I was a little kid so I don’t remember exactly how it started, but my three aunts on my mom's side ended up getting in a huge fight, one of them through the phone as she lives far away."
"While my mom was on the phone with that one trying to calm her down, the other two were running around the house flipping each other off (picture that video of those two guys flipping each other off in the street) and yelling until one of them got so mad she left. My entire family and I were just sitting in the living room watching this go down. Needless to say, I have never tried so hard not to laugh in my life."
16."A few years back, one of my siblings must have ticked my mother off, and with all the stress of the past couple of days, she just snapped and fully pushed the three-meter Christmas tree over and took a saw to make tiny pieces out of it – true story, and that woman is 5'2."
Nickelodeon / giphy.com
17."The year was 2012. My family had reached boiling point that year. My brother had been kicked out of the army, I was a 17-year-old stoner about to drop out of school, my parents' marriage was a shit-show and almost ripe for divorce, and my sister was over from the US for the holidays — you can imagine the mood was already bad enough."
"In the middle of Christmas dinner, the doorbell rings. Who the fuck disturbs a family on Christmas night, you ask? We were thinking the same thing. Without hesitation, my brother gets up from the table and disappears for several minutes. My father, after a few moments of broiling in his own emotions and changing his face color to all shades of red, gets up ready to shit on the unknown visitor, and finds my brother dealing weed to him. On Christmas night. You can imagine the drama that ensued. Little did we know that if my brother hadn't gotten up from the table and ensured my father would drive off for hours afterwards, my father would have told us of his year-long affair that night. That, as well as the child he was about to have with his mistress and that he was planning on leaving the family. So, my idiot brother actually saved Christmas by dealing drugs. My father did end up telling us around New Years."
18."My grandmother went out to the garage to smoke after Christmas dinner and intentionally slammed her arm in the car door, breaking her wrist in the process. Why? She wanted to see if her pain medication was working. Needless to say, her 'experiment' caused us to spend the rest of Christmas in the emergency room."
NBC / giphy.com
19.And lastly: "I went drinking with some buddies on the 23rd, and then went to Midnight Mass on the 24th. Things were going swimmingly, but then it hit me. I got the bubble-guts 10 minutes in."
"My gut forced me to let a silent fart out — this SBD had the power to melt candles, but luckily I got away with it since it was crowded and a baby was near. Then my gut wanted to make an encore, so I made a butt-clenching walk to the church bathrooms, which happened to only be one male and one female unit. The men's was occupied, so I ran to the women's and just about kicked the door open. Then it happened. When, I looked back to see the damage, there was no toilet paper, so I tore my skivvies off and wiped my ass with those. I waited outside by my parents car in the freezing cold with no jacket for another hour or so until the Mass ended, since my pants had poo splatter on them. My parents laughed their asses off the entire way home."
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
