Family members: we love them, but boy they’re weird. As a family, you live on top of one another in every sense of the phrase. And that means you get exposed to a lot of each other’s personal quirks. To be fair, we all have them. But some people’s oddities are, well, a little stranger than others.
When it comes to our family, we don’t always know how weird they are until we leave home. Many of us grew up doing and hearing things that we thought were normal…until the real world taught us otherwise. Do you mean other families don’t host a personal Christmas pageant every year?
And then there are the individual members of our families with their strange habits. Sometimes, we can’t make heads or tails of them.
Here’s the biggest secret: if you don’t have a family member with a weird habit, there’s a good chance you’re the weird one. Think about that while you read these stories of 75 families with odd habits. Then go ask your family what they think.
Quotes have been left as they were originally found. Any errors are the result of the original posters and have not been changed.
1. That might attract some stares
“If my boyfriend’s sister loses her friend or fiancé somewhere, she makes the sound of a parrot and they have to do it back. It’s like Marco Polo, but with bird noises.”
“My oldest brother always takes his guitar in the bathroom with him, just in case he has to poop. When he does, you’ll hear faint strumming all the way in the living room.”
“My grandpa purposely mispronounces certain words, usually by adding a syllable and/or emphasizing the wrong part of the word. For example, garage is said ‘ga-ra-GEE’ and garbage is said ‘ga-BAR-bage.’ It’s funny for a bit when visiting, but I can’t imagine what my grandma thinks.”
“My aunt wears rubber gloves — like a surgeon — every time she eats chicken wings. I see where she’s coming from with not wanting to get all sticky, but there’s…napkins.”
“My father-in-law refuses to peel the stickers off of anything expensive he buys. For example, his television still has all of the stickers on the edges of the screen.”
“My 18-year-old brother has to take off all his clothes and place them outside the bathroom before he uses it. He’s done this since we were little. And he can’t use the bathroom if anyone is on the same floor in the house as him.”
“He tears little pieces of newspaper off and chews them. I’m not certain if he swallows then. Sometimes when I read the paper he’ll ask for ‘a taste’.”
“My girlfriend has a habit of singing on the toilet. Like, even when she wakes up in the middle of the night to use it. No idea why. Not sure I want to know.”
“I was friends with my husband for 16 years before we got engaged and moved in together. That’s when I found out that he insists on sleeping fully clothed. Not in like a t-shirt and pajama bottoms — in his friggin’ jeans, shirt, and even his shoes!”
“Every time my husband pees, he flushes the toilet mid-pee in an attempt to ‘race’ the flush. It’s fucking weird, and I’ve never asked him why he does it.”
“My husband falls asleep in the most awkward, uncomfortable positions. He will stay up playing a video game or watching TV on the couch, then fall asleep. But he doesn’t lay down or lean his head back — he contorts himself into a human pretzel to sleep!”
“I can come home from a day at work when she is off all day and immediately tell what she ate, did and didn’t do all day. For clarity, our schedules conflict, so this is only twice a week. But today she had waffles and syrup for breakfast, a cheese stick for a snack, she looked at last night’s leftovers for lunch but opted for a salad, then had a banana and apple with peanut butter for a snack before cooking a delicious dinner minutes before I got home.”
“I found out that my wife is afraid of the dark. But not just random, dark, creepy, haunted-looking buildings and such. She’s afraid to the point that if she is alone, she has to sleep with a night light or if the hallway is dark, she needs me to walk with her.”
“He blows his nose into his towel and then dries off with it. He then hangs the towel over the shower rod so I always have to move his booger towel in order to shower. Sometimes his boogers even fall off into the tub. Just yuck, dude!”
“My husband’s talking has no off switch. If I’m not listening, he just talks to himself. He has full on conversations with himself in the shower. He pauses YouTube videos to give commentary. He’s pretty much only quiet when he sleeps…and even then, he snores!”
“My parents didn’t let us have keys to the house when we were pre-teen age, so when we’d get home from school or a friend’s house we would open a window and crawl through it to get inside. I never thought twice about it until a friend told me it looked like I was robbing the place after he dropped me off for the first time.”
“My husband eats deviled eggs with ferocity! He literally forgets to take breaks in-between eggs to breathe and he even starts fucking sweating. My mother didn’t believe me, so she made some for him for Christmas and got to witness the horror firsthand.”
“My family has always poured milk into our bowls of icecream. Always thought that was the only way to do it untill i had icecream at a friend’s house and had to ask for milk.”
“Not super weird, but our neighbour thought it was odd. If someone is leaving the house and you are in the living room, you get up from whatever you’re doing and stand at the window and wave to them. Basically, if they’ve said goodbye to you, you wave. I think we all feel a bit offended when someone doesn’t. Literally been a thing my whole life. Didn’t realise it wasn’t something everyone did until my teens.”
“I thought everyone who celebrated Christmas had a whole three-day celebration starting on December 23rd. You see, we have Ham Day (23rd), Turkey Day (24th), Christmas Breakfast (25th). We also get together New Year’s Day to eat pork chops and sauerkraut. That idea isn’t so weird, but the part that gets me some looks of disgust is when I mention how we pour maple syrup on the sauerkraut.”
“Whenever we got fast food, we would put all of our fries together in a big mound to share — sort of like communal fries. Once I was at a friend’s house and they bought us fast food, so I put my fries on a plate and pushed it to the middle of the table. Lots of strange looks.”
“My mom and I are terrible people so we would make up tragic stories about the people around us at restaurants. I went on a date with a guy once and the food was taking forever so I figured… let’s play the stories game. Not only was he mortified but he said ‘what would your mom think if she heard you talking about people like this?’ And I said ‘she’d probably agree that the dad is cheating on the woman, he looks like a cheater’”
“The dish cloth. As a kid, my family didn’t have napkins at the dinner table. We had a single, damp dish cloth (chux) that we used to pass around the dinner table and wipe out mouths and hands with. Just the one cloth. Sure it’s an easy way to clean up messy eaters, but damn its disgusting to look back on.”
“In my family, we finished the chicken to the bone — no meat, no gristle, nothing left. And if you didn’t finish it, someone would finish it for you. Well, flash-forward to college when I’m eating chicken in the cafeteria with my housemates. One of them didn’t clean their chicken wing, so I casually reached over and took it to finish it off, without interrupting the conversation. After a minute, I realized everyone was staring at me. ‘What?’ I asked, someone else’s chicken bone hanging out of my mouth.”
“We’re not together anymore, but I have an ex whose family would literally burn any meat they cooked for dinner. Chicken, fish, steak- all completely burned because they were terrified of bacteria on their food.”
“My in-laws share bathwater. Like, someone will take a bath and then the others will bathe in that same water. Maybe this is normal in some cultures, but it’s very foreign to me.”
“My friends suck the snot and boogers out of their kids’ noses with their mouth instead of having them blow into tissues. Then they go spit it out in the trash afterwards. I gagged like a motherfucker the first time I witnessed it.”
“My S.O.’s family has this weird rule that if a cat is sitting in your lap, you are not allowed to get up. Need a drink or snack? Someone will bring it to you. Phone or remote just out of reach? Someone will hand it to you. Just do not disturb this magical bonding.”
“On holidays, they have the same three or four people in the kitchen making food. They must put onions in or on everything. Ham, smothered in onions, potatoes, filled with onions, corn, filled with onions, bread turns into onion bread and even the Jell-O gets onions in it. To make matters worse, my son and I are both allergic to onions. We must bring our own food to eat.”
“At one point in my childhood, we had 36 cats who only came inside to eat and sleep at night. Any time a friend slept over, they were amazed and delighted when a half-dozen or more cats came in to sleep in my room. My dad even thought he was having a heart attack one time, because he woke up feeling intense pressure on his chest — it was actually two dozen cats. I found out later that my neighborhood considered us the weird house because of all the cats I thought were so awesome.”
“My fiance’s family has a long line of poop-journaling. His grandfather and great-grandfather were farmers, so their evening poop was their time of peace and rest. They would be in the bathroom for over an hour journaling about the day. They have about 50 collective volumes about life on the farm, financial states, reflections on their kids growing up- just these lovely elaborate memoirs about their lives. But there’s a pile that they ask no one to read until they’re dead, especially if things are particularly personal. Other than that, you are encouraged to grab any of them and read at your leisure.”
“Growing up my best friends family didn’t have traditional snacks like fruit rollups, gushers, etc. They ate sticks of butter. Sticks of fucking butter. Whenever they offered me some I always told them I wasn’t hungry. They had multiple packages of butter in the fridge and freezer. They didn’t consume the entire stick rather would cut off pieces. They weren’t poor, they weren’t fat, but they were fucking crazy.”
“So, my family are huge lovers of mango, and especially my dad. So when it’s mango season he’d buy a lot of mango and we’d all set around and eat mango in our underwear so we wouldn’t ruin our clothes. I thought this was normal as a kid, i even enjoyed it a lot too, but it feels pretty fucking bizarre now. Although i think the worst part is that’ll probably do the same thing with my kids lol.”
“At Christmas, we all give each other a set of underwear, which once you receive you have to say, ‘ooh thank you’ really loudly, stand up, then put the underwear on your head to show everyone. I had to have a serious conversation with my wife after her first Christmas with us.”
“We don’t refrigerate leftovers. Pizza? Goes in the oven. Turkey from thanksgiving? Oven. Fast food? Microwave. Now that I’m older and understand that food goes bad I refrigerate things, but my parents still don’t. I’m surprised no one’s gotten seriously ill from it.”
“My S.O.’s family firmly believes that houses should stay unlocked so that families can walk in and out uninvited as they please. My husband and I do not adhere to this, so our doors are always locked; my mother-in-law’s reaction was to take my husband’s keys and make copies so she could come and go as she pleased.”
“Salt was for guests only. The actual use of spices was VERY looked down on in my house and was seen as a huge insult to my mom and dad, even though they were absolutely horrid cooks.”
“My S.O.’s family wants EVERY LIGHT in the house to be ON. They can be doing something, notice the light is off in the next room over and be like, ‘Oh, someone turned the light off,’ walk over to turn it on, then immediately go back to whatever they were doing in the other room.”
“We had ‘family council’ every Sunday night after dinner. We would sit and say good things that happened that week, share our grievances if we had any (we always did), make a dinner menu, and assign chores. Frankly, it was stellar parenting.”
“My in-laws celebrate family birthdays every few months all at once- maybe two or three birthdays all combined. And that’s not the weird part. The weird part is that when greeting cards are opened, everyone passes them around and everyone else reads them.”
“First thing upon coming into the house, you had to change into clean pants and wash your hands. Guests were exempt from the pants rule, but not the hand washing rule. Also, if you took your shoes off at any point while you were out, you had to change your socks, as well.”
“My in-laws have a song called ‘The Christmas Song’ that makes unwrapping presents at Christmas a very slow process. Here’s what you do: The youngest kid is in charge of getting presents from under the tree. The kid announces the receiver of the present, let’s call him Bob, and then the singing starts. The song ends with “and an itty bitty present for Bob,” and then Bob can open his present. We all admire the present, and Bob thanks the giver. And then we start over until all the presents have been opened. This usually takes what feels about three weeks.”
“When I was really young I had a ‘night night bell.’ It was this old clay bell that hung in the kitchen and, when I had to go to bed, I got to ring the bell and everyone would come say ‘good night,’ then I would go to bed.”
“My family kept stuff in the oven – nearly every baking pan plus all the snacks like chips and crackers and the bread. We had to unload it all onto the clothes washer to use the oven. We accidentally melted stuff on occasion. Miraculously no fires.”
“We were not allowed to use the front door. Ever. There was a metal screen on it with a deadbolt that needed a key for either side. My stepdad kept the key and even visitors had to go to the back through the side gate.”
“My grandmother always thought the hand signal for ‘I love you’ was to stick your middle finger straight up like you’re flipping someone the bird. Well, when she would send my dad and his sisters out of the house for the day, she’d innocently flip them the bird while yelling that she loved them.”
“My family had a thing we called the ‘food blanket.’ When we’d eat casual meals, we’d lay a blanket on the living room floor and eat on it, like a picnic. Instead of ‘set the table,’ my mom would say, ‘Go lay out the blanket!’ I remember being really confused when I learned that every family didn’t have a ‘food blanket.'”
“My mother was so religious that I thought deviled eggs were called ‘angel eggs’ until I was 15, when I said ‘angel eggs’ at a family gathering and everyone looked at me like I was crazy.”
“We couldn’t go into the kitchen barefoot. It was a third-generation rule. My mom couldn’t, and neither could my grandfather. He couldn’t because he had dirt floors in the kitchen growing up, so when he had kids — even though the floor was linoleum — he couldn’t shake the rule, so my mom couldn’t either and now my mom has rolled the rule over to us.”
“Apparently dipping buttered toast in hot chocolate is weird, my family always did it and would eat it for breakfast and stuff but when I told my friends about it they said they have never heard of anyone doing that.”
“We never had birthday parties. Birthdays were observed, but there were never parties. I got toys, some good food, but no one was invited ever. My father told me it was a family tradition. Many years later, when I realized that absolutely everyone I knew did in fact have birthday parties, I looked into the matter more closely and found that an ancestor had apparently died after his birthday party, and since then all parties were forbidden in the family.”
“Growing up, when my family made tacos, they always put that orange wishbone French dressing on them. I didn’t realize this wasn’t a thing until I went to a friend’s house for Taco Tuesday with her family and I asked for French Dressing. They looked at me like I was crazy lol”
“My mom makes gravy with every meal. It’s a staple in my family. If we want to make something quick to eat, we put gravy over rice, potatoes, veggies, bread, anything we find. It all goes great with gravy! It must be a ‘my mom’ thing because I’ve gone to dinner with her at friends houses and am used to her turning to me and whispering incredulously ‘are they not serving gravy with this meal?’”
75 people share their family members’ weirdest habits
Cedric Jackson
02.25.20
Family members: we love them, but boy they’re weird. As a family, you live on top of one another in every sense of the phrase. And that means you get exposed to a lot of each other’s personal quirks. To be fair, we all have them. But some people’s oddities are, well, a little stranger than others.
When it comes to our family, we don’t always know how weird they are until we leave home. Many of us grew up doing and hearing things that we thought were normal…until the real world taught us otherwise. Do you mean other families don’t host a personal Christmas pageant every year?
And then there are the individual members of our families with their strange habits. Sometimes, we can’t make heads or tails of them.
Here’s the biggest secret: if you don’t have a family member with a weird habit, there’s a good chance you’re the weird one. Think about that while you read these stories of 75 families with odd habits. Then go ask your family what they think.
Quotes have been left as they were originally found. Any errors are the result of the original posters and have not been changed.
