I haven’t read the replies, so I’m sorry if you’ve already answers this. But is your Aunt living in a separate part of the country from the rest of your your/her family?
I have an aunt who is exactly like this. Our whole family is from a northeast state and she and my uncle, early on in their marriage, moved hundreds of miles away to a southern state a few decades ago for my uncle’s job. She raised her whole family in the southern state and really romanticized the rest of the family back in the northeast. Over the years, perhaps understandably, she became very bitter that she’d travel back to the northeast for nearly all family holiday milestones but those same relatives rarely came to her state to visit her. As she’s gotten older, her immediate family milestones have become kind of a “let’s see who is going to show up for ME” test. I know this because I’d visit my cousins fairly frequently, simply because I was close with one of them.
Could this be the dynamic.
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