Chelsea Handler hosts her extended family for a vacation every summer—and pays for the whole thing. This year, she sent them a letter first.
The comedian shared it on Instagram on July 22: a multi-slide document laying out what she expects from anyone who wants to come. “If you want to vacation with me, these are the rules,” she wrote, describing the letter as a response to what she called a shortfall of manners on previous trips. As she put it, it’s not a free-for-all.
The rule at the top has nothing to do with her.
“You have to make eye contact with every person that comes inside the house,” she said, reading from the letter during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live. “Whether you know them, whether they’re cleaning your room, whether you have anything in common, you have to make eye contact with people and say hello, thank you, acknowledge someone is standing there.”
Handler had noticed her relatives moving through a house where people were working—cleaning their rooms and delivering their food—without registering that those people existed.
The rest of the list is more domestic. Phones off at dinner. No sitting in front of a screen while everyone else is playing a game. “You have to be present,” she said. “This is what a family vacation is about.” Pairs rotate dishwasher duty so the same few people aren’t cleaning up every night. Don’t leave beer bottles under the deck. And do not, under any circumstances, drink the last of the margaritas without making more.
That last one had a specific origin. “There was a lot of finishing alcohol without replenishing the alcohol,” she noted, “because half of them are underage, drinking our alcohol.”
Her family did not receive the letter warmly. “They were obviously appalled,” she said. “They were like, ‘Oh my God, now she’s yelling at us?’”
She also took a share of the blame, which is the detail that keeps the whole thing from reading like a lecture from someone with a bigger house. “Part of it is my fault,” she said. “I take responsibility for providing these kinds of extravagant vacations.”
Her position is not that her relatives are ungrateful people; it’s that she set up an arrangement where nobody had to think about the labor holding it together and then got annoyed that nobody thought about it.
The response online was mostly people asking to be adopted. One commenter pointed out that the rules scale down just fine: they’re useful for every kind of vacation, not just the extremely generous ones.
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