What a perfect question.

I just had a discussion with my family about how my older brother and his wife blew us off for Christmas. It's the third year in a row they've pulled something like this (one year skipping a 10 day vacation we had booked and costing my parents thousands) and once again mom and dad made arrangements to see them, made enough food, stuffed stockings, wrapped presents, etc. My younger sister was very quick to rush to his defense because she thinks they're close (she's very naive) and in the process of "starting their own lives" so it's okay. I started to explain that "starting your own life" (mind you, they literally sat in their house by themselves a half hour away the entire day, no kids or work responsibilities) isn't an excuse to be a dick to your parents and not even show up or call when they put in thought and did so much to prepare, and her response was "Well they're your family, it's not fair to say anything about them while they're not here to defend themselves, and they're what we've got so it's more important that we don't start a fight."

This would be a totally fair and logical thing to say if this wasn't coming from the girl who, while in the process of stealing my ex, said countless hateful and untrue things about me to make herself look better to him via text that were later sent to me in screenshots (weird, I wasn't there to defend myself). And even when he called her on it and told her you can't treat/talk about family that way, she said, "What? She's my sister. That means nothing to me."

Seeing as that was yet another situation I have to pretend never happened, I decided it was probably best for me to excuse myself before I erupted.