Woman Excludes Sister from Family Gift Plans After She Went ‘Above and Beyond’ Behind Her Siblings’ Backs for Present

A woman decided to exclude her sister from family gift planning after her sister “secretly” bought a very expensive present for their father’s birthday.

In an ‘Am I the A——?’ post on Reddit, the woman explained that the issue began when her sister bought their dad an iPhone without telling the rest of the siblings, which made them feel like their gifts were not enough.

“We never really celebrated birthdays growing up, so it was sort of an unspoken rule to keep the gifts, if any, simple,” she wrote. “Every year, me and my two sisters would come together to agree on gifts and share the cost.”

“At my father’s birthday, my sister decided to buy him an extra gift on the side without telling us—a new iPhone,” she added. “My father is fairly wealthy and wasn’t looking for a new iPhone, so it was a strange gift. It was even stranger that it was a ‘secret gift’ until the last minute.”

The woman said she was “upset” by her sister’s secret gift, especially after giving a much simpler present herself.

“It made me and [my other sister] look bad,” she wrote. “What annoys me the most is that even if [my sister] wanted to give the gift, she could have told us earlier so we could have chosen a better one.”

The woman explained that her sister had given secret gifts before, but “on a much smaller scale.” She said, “The iPhone really overshadowed everyone else’s gifts.”

With their mother’s birthday coming up, the woman said she and her other sister decided not to tell their sister about their gift plans. However, her sister “caught on and is upset.”

“She thinks we are being excessively mean because we are planning her exclusion,” she wrote, asking, “AITA [Am I the A——] for not involving our sister in our gift plans anymore?”

Some people sided with her, like one commenter who wrote, “Whatever her reason for giving the more expensive gift on her own, she knew she was breaking with ‘tradition’ and didn’t care if you two were upset, so why worry about her feelings now?”

Others disagreed, saying, “You’ve turned gift-giving into a petty competition and forgotten that gifts are about the recipient. If I were your mother, I’d be disappointed that my birthday present is more about scoring points than celebrating me.”