How Do You Share the Holidays with Extended Family?
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Here’s a fun question for today: How do you share the holidays with extended family? For example, does one grandmother get a visit during Thanksgiving break, and the other gets a visit during the December/New Year break? Do you save certain events for just your partner and kids? This could look a lot of different ways — and gets more complicated if someone is divorced.
{related: our favorite holiday traditions}
When I was a kid growing up in Ohio, my mother’s family was all local, whereas my father’s family was pretty distant (South Dakota and beyond), and my maternal extended family was much more “into” the holidays than my paternal extended family — in part because my grandfather had been a surgeon so he was often on call. My maternal family was also much more religious than my paternal family, and we all attended Catholic church every Sunday.
So growing up, we spent Thanksgiving Day with my maternal grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins — and we spent Christmas Day with the same crew. (One set of cousins would leave midday to visit their other parent’s extended family, who were also local.) We saved Christmas Eve for just our nuclear family, and my parents, brother, and I would have a fancy candlelit dinner with steak, lobster, and my (paternal) grandmother’s cranberry cake.
(My father’s family only visited us once or twice, and I only remember spending one Christmas out there.)
When I first got married, it took a bit of adjusting to realize that we should split the holidays with my husband’s parents — it just wasn’t the way I was raised!
It’s also been weird to realize that if people are visiting, you can’t really “save” an event just for your nuclear family — so goodbye, intimate candlelit dinner. Even opening presents on Christmas morning can feel a bit like an intimate event that everyone should be invited to if the visiting extended family has access to it.
(My kids tend to be up at 6:00 and opening presents shortly thereafter, though, so it isn’t really a time I’m ready for a big gaggle of guests…)
I should note also that my husband is an only child and my only brother is unmarried without kids, so we more or less have the grandparents’ full attention.
I’ve seen a variety of threadjacks like this, with readers being dismayed that their parents (or in-laws) expect them to travel multi-leg stops with a toddler, being annoyed parents or in-laws are crashing for a long time (or not having space for them to visit), or even being pissed that the parents are demanding dinner be served at a certain time or to certain specifications. (All for good reason, I think!)
So, readers, let’s hear it — what does this look like for your family, no matter which holidays you celebrate? If you have divorced parents or are divorced yourself, what does it look like? If you have siblings with kids (and in-laws of their own), how has that factored into the equation? Do you feel like the split between your family and your partner’s family is equitable? Were these holiday traditions negotiated, are they flexible, or have you just sort of fallen into a pattern that repeats each holiday season?
