Q
Dear Auntie Pearl, I am sitting in a real situation here and I was wondering what you would say about it.
Apparently, my father is not happy with the Christmas present I bought him.
My father has gone and moaned to my wife that he wasn’t impressed with the gift we got him and his new wife.
He is 62 years old, and she is about the early 50s, I think.
They got married two years ago. They think they are very fancy.
We brought them a really nice handmade sign for their house with a message on it, from a market here in Cape Town.
They just bought a new house and we thought it would be nice.
We also got some handmade candles, and apparently the new wife skeems they are “c***py”, and (what we thought) was a good bottle of wine, they say is cheap.
What do they want from us?
I know it’s family, but I was bedonnerd when my wife told me about this.
And I felt bad for my wife – she picked out the gifts!
My dad thinks he’s very fancy and lives in Somerset West while we live in Mitchells Plain – and he’s forever saying something about it.
Meanwhile, he also comes from the Plain.
The wife is quite wealthy, and they don’t really work anymore and go on lots of trips.
We don’t have loads of money to spend on gifts en ek voel regtig innie gesig gevat about his vrot attitude.
My dad and I have always had a difficult relationship, and I think this will now just go and make things worse.
I haven’t spoken to him about this. I’m too irritated.
A
Jinne, your daddy needs a bietjie of talking to if you ask me!
Where does he get off moaning about a gift he received?
Talk about looking a gift horse in the gevriet.
A present, especially a Christmas gift, mos comes from the heart.
But it doesn’t sound like your dad cares much for the heart, or that there’s lots of love lost between you two.
Auntie skeem you need to be the bigger person here and act like the adult in the relationship.
Don’t go taking him on about this, because you will just end up saying things that could have been left unsaid, and saying things that will do more damage than good.
Now, of course, you want to, but you, Krismis is al amper ’n maand verby, and who has time to carry around so much k@k, and here we are almost in the second month of a new year.
It sounds like there are loads of unspoken issues between you and your father.
Rather look at those things and work on your relationship going forward this year, instead of hammering on old things that can stay where they are.
And for the record, it sounds like it was a lovely gift that anyone should be glad to receive!
Now make sure you go visit him before he finishes that lekker bottle of wine all by himself!