Thread by @torriangray

I may have mentioned this before, but my grandmother was incredibly racist against, of all things, Finnish people. She warned us early and often to avoid Finns because they're clannish and carry knives.

Don't get me wrong, she was regular 'ol racist as well, but for whatever reason she had a special hatred in her heart for Finns. This is doubly funny to me because her husband's family came from an area of Norway known as Finnskogen, Forest of the Finns.

When my mom and dad first started dating she expressed concerns about their potential kids struggling in society as products of a mixed marriage.

My dad was Norwegian and my mother is Swedish.

Then she decided my mother wasn't actually Swedish since she has brown hair and brown eyes and ALL Swedes have blonde hair and blue eyes.

Literally all of them.

Early on in their relationship my dad started drifting from my mom because he met a guy down at the marina he hung out with that volunteered to teach him how to sail. My dad was OBSESSED with sail boats and spent almost every free moment down there boating.

After awhile the guy told my dad he couldn't do it anymore and admitted my grandma had paid him to befriend my dad and distract him to break up his relationship. Full on 80s movie B plot bullshit.

Eventually my parents did get married. They eloped and went to one of the Dakotas to get married. My mom ended up in the emergency room with appendicitis. My dad called my grandma in a panic and she told him "good job, you picked a defective one."

In their early years of marriage my grandma would accuse my mom of stealing things. Weird things like tupperware. Her assumption was because my mom came from a "lower class" family that she was a thief who was constantly casing their house for anything of value to steal.

The first Christmas they were together my Grandma had gifts for everyone BUT my mom. She then said "Oh I know we had something for you" then went upstairs and grabbed a random Scrabble set and handed it to her unwrapped. "Merry Christmas".

By FAR my favorite crazy Grandma thing was her accusing my mother of having a seventh baby that she hid from my grandparents. I have ZERO idea how this started, but she was dead-set on the idea that there was another kid she wasn't allowed to see.

It became a joke in the house. "GRANDMA'S COMING, HIDE THE BABY!". I'd run and grab my little brother's creepy My Buddy doll and whip it in the closet.

Henceforth we dubbed the ghost baby "Bubba the Closet Baby."

When my Grandma was little her mother used to threaten to sell her to the "gypsies" for a "changling" when she misbehaved, so she was also deeply suspicious of and bigoted towards Roma people.

However at one point in her childhood her mother punished her by leaving her to clean all the silver in the house, and a Roma person stopped by offering to fix pots and pans (I guess that was something that happened back in the day) and she sold all their silver to them.

At one point she stopped talking to our cousins because they sent her a nice thank you note and signed it "hope to see you soon" and she decided "soon" meant "dinner Wednesday at 6".

To this day I don't understand how that translation occurred.