Letters of Christmases Past

And a holiday sale to boot!

My cat Oscar under the tree.

Hello friends!

It’s well established that you’re more likely to cry than laugh while reading the letters people write to Sugar, but every now and then I get a funny letter. I’m including one of my funny favorites from the archives below. It’s from a man who signed his letter “Sexy Santa,” which seems appropriate since one of the reasons I’m writing to you now is to tell you that I’m offering a 20% discount on paid subscriptions to the Dear Sugar Letters this holiday season. I know many of you are already paid subscribers (thank you—and more on that below), but if you’ve been thinking about making the leap to get “the full experience,” now is a great time to do it. The sale goes through December 25th. You can make it all happen here:

As a reminder, paid subscribers get:

• A monthly Dear Sugar Letter, which arrives in your inbox each month, plus access the entire archives of previously published columns any time on my Substack page.

• The ability to post comments and join the Dear Sugar community.

• My regular (free) newsletter, which I publish intermittently about six times a year (this newsletter you’re reading right now is one of them).

• My unending gratitude for your generous support of this Sugary work I do. Truly. If you’re already a paid subscriber, here is a gigantic THANK YOU. You lift me up. You help me pay for Oscar’s cat treats (which he loves, though they’re apparently not half as tasty as the dried-out gingerbread ornaments my kids made for me a decade ago that he annually wrenches from the tree). You fill my heart. You make me want to keep making this.

I’ve also included another holiday-related letter from the archives below. It’s a remarkably unfunny one, written by a woman whose brother has terrorized her since childhood. She’s decided she wants to cut him out of her life, but her parents, who have also suffered his abuse, refuse to do so. The letter writer is torn about what to do for Christmas because if she celebrates the holiday with her beloved parents, as usual, it means she’ll have to celebrate it with her brother too.

Her problem, like most of our problems, is entirely original and yet universal too. How and when and where do we draw the boundaries we need to draw with family members whose choices or behaviors make us miserable? The holidays give most of us the opportunity to grapple with that question at least a few times in our lives (and for some of you, every damn year!). I try to think of that as a good thing, but wow, I also know sometimes it’s just hard and it feels like it will be hard forever, though seldom is that true. As I tell the letter writer, when we make healthy decisions about who we have in our lives and how they get to treat us, a glorious something else awaits, even if we can’t see what it is at the present time.

Thankfully, the biggest drama I expect this holiday season will be how to keep Oscar and my two other beloved cats, George and Hugo, from crapping in the pot that will hold the live Christmas tree we’re renting for the first time this year (later, it’ll be planted in my local watershed by the company that’s renting it to us).

Wishing every one of you a beautiful holiday, however and whichever you celebrate. Reach for the love you want and need. Savor the beauty in every day. I’m forever rooting for you.

xCheryl

PS: If you want to give the gift of a subscription to the Dear Sugar Letters to someone else, click the button below. (Sadly, I can’t apply the holiday discount to gift subscriptions, as the powers that be at Substack won’t let me.)

---

Dear Sugar,

Kind of crazy, but my girlfriend is seriously turned on by Santa Claus. The old dude, big belly, white beard, his power to find out if you’re naughty or nice, etc. The whole thing just gets her going. It’s our first Christmas together. We’re both in our early thirties. We started dating about ten months ago and now we’re in love. She rocks. Great sense of humor, sweet personality, intelligent, hot, and the best sex I’ve ever had. She told me about the Santa fantasy a few weeks ago when Santa started to pop up all over the place. She gets especially turned on when she sees an actual Santa, which starts her thinking about sitting in his lap and what could happen next. You get the picture.

So here’s my question. My sister has two young sons. A few years ago, she bought a Santa suit and I’ve been dressing up in it and going over to her place to give my nephews a thrill on Christmas eve. I don’t have kids of my own yet, but I love my nephews like mad and it’s cool to see how excited they get when “I” (aka Santa) walk in the door.

Anyway, you know what’s coming next, right? It occurred to me that if I keep the suit an extra day I can give my girlfriend a thrill too. I wouldn’t tell my sister about it or anything, obviously. I’d just put the suit to a little extra use before I returned it.

Creepy? Good idea? Bad idea? It’s not my fantasy personally, but I guess it would be fun enough. What does the sweet and sultry Sugar make of this plan?

Thanks.

Sexy Santa

Dear Sexy Santa,

It’s letters like yours that make me happy I’m Sugar. That’s beautiful. That’s hilarious. Your giving spirit is genuinely what this holiday is all about. I say let her have it, sweet pea. Stuff that woman’s stocking the way only Santa knows how.

Yours,

Sugar

---

Dear Sugar,

My older brother has terrorized me for as long as I can remember. The worst physical abuse was probably the time he gave me a concussion when I didn’t answer the door quickly enough, after he rang the bell because he was locked out (I was 8, he was 12). The worst mental abuse was probably the time he killed my pet rat by cutting her neck and stomach open, then put her on my pillow (I was 11, he was 14). There were all kinds of mini-cruelties in between. I literally have no happy memories between us—I have happy memories of my childhood, but none between us. The closest I felt to a brother-sister love was the time he called me a fat greedy cow for eating the last of the cheese. I either hadn’t eaten the cheese, or was trying to deflect his anger, because I protested that it wasn’t me, and he replied that he knew it was me because I was “the person in the house who most loved cheese.” I remember that exactly, because I was shocked that he knew that about me (I did love cheese, still do). So deep was his disdain for me that the realization that I even existed to him when he wasn’t berating or beating me blew my little mind.

My parents did what they could, punishing him when they saw it, but I learned quickly that telling was worse than not telling. If he was punished by them, I’d be punished by him. His behavior worsened as he got older and it also extended beyond me. He had his first trouble with the law in his early teens, got into drugs, dropped out of high school, and has been in and out of jail, rehab, and mental institutions. By the time I was 18, my brother had been arrested multiple times. He had one child and another on the way. I went to college across the country, partly to get away from the havoc he wrought.

Now I’m 29. About a year ago—after ten years of living away from home and learning that just because my brother doesn’t love me doesn’t mean I’m unloveable (something he would often tell me, by the way)—I moved back to my hometown. I’d been living in a big city, with no hope of moving up in a soul-crushing career. I love my parents and my niece and nephew and I missed them. My hometown has a good master’s program in a field I’m interested in and I enrolled. It’s been great. I feel energized living again in a town I love.

My brother hasn’t changed, but I don’t have any contact with him unless he calls for me for money or needs help with the kids. My parents aren’t so lucky. They support him in every way possible. He has horrible credit, so they bought a house for him to “rent” from them (of course he never pays). He can’t get a job with his felony record, so they buy him food and pay for daycare and anything his kids need (their moms are okay, but can't support them alone). My parents even bought back the iPods they gave to my niece and nephew for Christmas last year after my brother pawned them.

Of course, he treats my parents just as you would expect a meth/cokehead sociopath to treat people. He steals from them, calls them names, threatens to physically harm them, lies to them about everything and anything. My parents get upset, draw the line, call everything the last straw, but they always give him a second chance because he is their son. Always. He manipulates them with kindness as easily as he manipulates them with terror, and when he does that, things are fine for a week, then get bad again.

Last week it got the worst it’s ever been. My mom wouldn’t give him money—she’d just given him a $100 the day before, and had nothing more to give—so he threw a wine bottle at her, spit in her face, threw plates on the floor, rampaged through the house, threw their cat against the wall, and destroyed furniture. He left when my mom called the cops, though he stopped to steal beers from the fridge as he went.

Things were strict for a few days: my parents would not return his calls and they would not allow him into the house again, only interacting with his baby mamas in regards to the kids. But, as always, he weaseled his way back in without an apology or even acknowledgment of the incident. Seriously, Sugar, that’s what gets me! These things happen, and he calls them for a favor the next day and pretends nothing was wrong. My parents have long tried to get him help for anything and everything that could help him stop being a lunatic, but he refuses. It’s the rest of the world that has a problem, not him. My parents blame drugs because they didn’t see the worst of him as a kid, like I did. I think he’s just an evil person.

Yet, I would forgive him the nastiness of his brotherhood. Yes, it was beyond anything normal, but we’re adults now, and if he was apologetic and had grown out of his “bullying,” I would have been fine. I would have welcomed a relationship. But I can’t forgive what he’s done to my parents. If anyone else treated them this way, there would be restraining orders and court dates.

This is a long story, Sugar, for a simple question about Christmas.

I want my brother out of my life. I think about what he’s done to my parents and I feel such an impotent rage. While writing this letter to you, I had to leave the computer at points to calm down because my fingers were shaking. I don’t want to sit across the table from someone who’s called my mother a fucking cunt. But as long as my parents let him in, I feel I can’t cut him out. We always have a family Christmas, but this year I want to put my foot down. I want to say that I won’t be there when he is. I’ll do whatever my parents want, because I love them, but I won’t do anything involving him, because I love them. I cannot abide anyone who would hurt them. He’s stolen their peace of mind, their belief in themselves as good people, and their identities (literally—having committed such fraud via their credit cards and bank accounts; because they refuse to press charges, their credit is shot).

I worry that refusing to see my brother at Christmas would be an empty gesture and that it would only cause more drama and pain in my parents’ lives. I would miss my niece and nephew on Christmas and I want to make a normal day for them (though I see them all the time, since my parents take care of them 99% of the time when my brother has custody). But I don’t know what else I can do.

I feel so powerless—the same way I felt as an 11 year-old living with someone who threatened to kill me on a weekly basis. I can’t do anything to help my parents, and they won’t do anything to help themselves. I can’t talk to friends about this, because they don’t understand why my parents don’t cut him off. My parents have been told by lawyers, cops, therapists, and friends—and me—that they are enabling my brother and that they should cut ties with him, but they won’t. I’ve given up on trying to change their approach. I just want to feel in control of who I have in my life. I don't think I should have to pretend to love someone who hurts my parents. Yet I know my parents would be hurt if I refuse to have Christmas with them and my brother. They’d see it as a judgment on them. Sugar, what should I do?

Love and kisses,

C.

Dear C,

Screw Christmas. Something far more important is at stake. That would be your emotional well-being, as well as the dignity and grace and integrity of your life. It’s such a cliché, but it’s true: you must set boundaries.

Fucked up people will try to tell you otherwise, but boundaries have nothing to do with whether you love someone or not. They are not judgments, punishments, or betrayals. They are a purely peaceable thing: the basic principles you identify for yourself that define the behaviors that you will tolerate from others, as well as the responses you will have to those behaviors. Boundaries teach people how to treat you and they teach you how to respect yourself. In a perfect world, our parents model healthy personal boundaries for us. In your world, you must model them for your parents—for whom boundaries have either never been in place or have gone gravely askew.

Emotionally healthy people sometimes behave badly. They lose their tempers, say things they either shouldn’t have said or could have said better, and occasionally allow their hurt, fear or anger to compel them to act in inappropriate, unkind ways. They eventually acknowledge this and make amends. They are imperfect, but essentially capable of discerning which of their behaviors are destructive and unreasonable and they attempt to change them, even if they don’t wholly succeed. That’s called being human.

The situation you describe is different, C. It’s a deeply embedded family system that functions entirely off kilter. Your story reads like a hostage tale, one in which your destructive and irrational brother is holding the gun. He has taught you and your parents how to treat him and you all obey, even when it’s nuts to do so. In what universe does a man assault his mother, abuse her cat, and ransack her house?

Yours. Which means you must exile yourself from it or you will suffer forever. You must make a world of your own. You can take the first steps now, but the internal weeding out of so much familial dysfunction is going to be a years-long process, no doubt. I strongly encourage you to seek counseling.

So let’s talk about Christmas.

What a terrible situation you’re in. Your brother is a sociopath and your parents are his suckers. There is no way to extricate yourself from this without extricating yourself. You want to cut off all ties with your brother, so do that. Remember what I said about boundaries not having anything to do with whether you loved someone or not? Here’s where that part comes in. Your parents are good people who have lost themselves in a nightmare. I don’t agree with their continued support of your brother, but I understand their impulse to do so. Your brother is their son, the boy they’d have died for probably from the minute he was born. But they didn’t have to die for him. He’s killing them instead.

You mustn’t stand by, a willing onlooker. I’m not telling you that. You’re telling me that. So don’t stand by. Tell your parents you love them and then simply love them. Give to them all the gorgeous daughterness you have inside of you. But do not participate in their self-destruction. Inform them that you will be cutting off all ties with your brother and map out a plan for seeing them on Christmas and beyond. Don’t let them try to talk you out of your decision, even if your decision means you spend Christmas alone. Let this be the first step of many in your liberation from the tyranny of your brother.

As for your niece and nephew, I hope you can continue to be a presence in their lives. How about approaching their mothers to make arrangements to see them when they are not under your brother’s care? (You didn’t ask about this, but I’m terribly worried about those kids. You say their mothers are “okay,” but you also say your brother—who is not okay—has partial custody of his children. Even if your parents take care of them “99% of the time,” it doesn’t sound to me like your brother should be the legal custodian of anyone right now, even for a little while. I encourage you to investigate ways you can to protect those children by working with your niece and nephew’s mothers, and possibly your parents, to legally limit your brother’s contact with them.)

Your fear about your parents being hurt by your choices is valid. They will likely feel some pain when you tell them about your plans. Your cooperation in their wildy codependent behaviors has no doubt been a consolation to them. When you set new boundaries there is often strife and sorrow, but your life will be changed for the better. And maybe—just maybe—the example you set will motivate your parents to make some changes of their own.

Lastly, what I’d like to impress upon you is this: in spite of the complexity of your situation, it’s notable that you didn’t waver when it came to what you know to be the right thing to do. That’s because you know the right thing to do. So do it. It’s hard, I know. It’s one of the hardest things you’ll ever have to do. And you’re going to bawl your head off doing it. But I promise you it will be okay. Your tears will be born of grief, but also of relief. You will be better for them. They will make you harder, softer, cleaner, dirtier. Free.

A glorious something else awaits.

Yours,

Sugar