35-year-old deliberately works on Christmas Day to avoid spending Christmas with his cruel father: 'I can finally have a Christmas that feels good and relaxed.'

Sometimes it's better to choose your peace over making everyone else happy.

There's a great deal of expectation on adult children to spend Christmas with their families, especially if they don't live in the same area. After all, if you only see your mom once or twice a year, you're probably seeing her at Christmastime. That is all well and good if you have a good relationship with your parents, but many adult children try to avoid them for very good reasons. You can't believe everything a boomer says about their child being lazy and entitled without getting the other side of the story. Maybe their adult child actually is lazy and entitled, but in 99% of cases, an adult child is not going to cut off their parents for seemingly no reason. If a parent and a child have a bad relationship for years and years and years, and neither of them can work to heal it, it's only natural for them to grow apart once the child no longer depends on the adult for survival. Parents don't always handle it well when their child confronts them about their shortcomings, because there will always be an imbalance of power between an adult and the adult who changed their diapers 30-odd years ago.