@deb922 - if you don’t mind, is it ok to add my own holiday whining to this thread?
Every year for what feels like forever, my kids & SIL’s kids ask if we can all get together around Thanksgiving or Christmas. Every year, my SIL is evasive and says, “Maybe, we’ll see,” which is really SIL-speak for “No,” but she’s too afraid of being assertive and saying no. Instead, she says, “Maybe, I’ll have to get back to you.” And then she just never gets back to you.
SIL also is really bad at returning phone calls, answering text messages. She’s bad at communication of all kinds.
Every year, SIL will always say, “Maybe we could come visit for a few days between Christmas and New Year’s.” She says this in front of her kids and my kids. So all 4 kids get excited. And all of the kids repeatedly ask their parents about it.
And then every year, it never happens. DH repeatedly calls & texts his sister to ask about it and after multiple attempts to reach her, she finally says no. But about half of the time, New Year’s Day comes and goes with no communication from her at all.
We’ve even offered to go there to them and we usually get no reply or response to that either.
this isn’t a new thing. Heck, 2 days before SIL’s wedding day, she still hadn’t told everybody where the rehearsal dinner was going to be. She wouldn’t tell anybody the location until 1 of the groomsmen shouted at her and told her that if she didn’t give him the address & time to show up for the rehearsal dinner, he wasn’t showing up to the dinner. 
My kids would love to spend a holiday or even a day or 2 NEAR a holiday with their cousins. But it never happens because my SIL is a flake and has made it clear through her behavior that she’s just not interested in spending time with us.
And the AIL & UIL who seem to be allergic to driving anywhere more than an hour? Well, after MIL’s death a year ago, they’ve pretty much hardly spoken to us. Not even a phone call to wish D24 a happy graduation from high school…this from the people who claim to care about DH & SIL & their immediate families so much. Um sure, ok.
With all of DH’s extended family, I used to knock myself to make everybody else happy. Would turn myself into a pretzel over it all. You’d be amazed at the amount of hand wringing and pearl clutching all of them would do over something as simple as “What is sbinaz serving for the holiday meal?” That topic alone would result in 8 weeks of repeated phone calls and questions. I’d lost count the # of times over the past 20 years that AIL would say, “You know, I have celiac disease” or how many times my MIL would say, “You know, I’m a diabetic. Will there be anything there for me to eat?”
OMG, YES! There will be GLUTEN-FREE GRAVY, gluten-free sides, plenty of low-sugar foods for the diabetics, etc., etc. Nobody was poisoned. Nobody got sick afterwards because they ingested something containing an allergen or whatever. Nobody got sick from cross contamination.
I even bought a $50 gluten-free pie one year just for AIL, which UIL then promptly ate 75% of in one sitting all on his own, leaving no left overs for AIL.
I could go on and on, but you get the idea. LOL. 
I myself have gotten so much nonsense from my own parents over the years about dragging my kids across the country to visit them in person at their house…at times when we really couldn’t afford it because of lack of time, money, work or school limitations, whatever, that I vowed to myself that I’m never going to put my kids through that when they are adults w/their own families.
And in my opinion, once my kids get married, the kid + their spouse becomes a family unit and DH & I turn into ‘extended family.’ Therefore at that time, what I want goes on the back burner.
My older daughter has a big interest in going into healthcare. So I totally expect that once she’s in the working world after college, there will be a fair number of Thanksgivings and Christmases where she might have to work. That’s ok. We’ll go to her and heck, I’m happy to cook the whole meal and we can eat on whatever day she wants at whatever time.
What I do NOT want for myself is to be on my death bed and think, “Oh man, I really wish I hadn’t spent so much time at my own house grumpy about how come my kids don’t visit me.”
Families are messy. Every family has some kind of dysfunctional stuff in it. I’d also encourage you and all of us to consider that it’s ok to rock the boat and do things differently going forward…just because something was “always done this way in OUR family” doesn’t mean that is something that you should do that way in perpetuity.
Remember:
- when somebody shows you who they are, believe them.
- continue forward however you want people to treat you.
- it’s easier to hold onto a handful of sand with an open palm than a closed fist.
