LOL, I am the one who complains here longingly because two of my sons have taken to doing Christmas with their spouse’s folks. I really do like their in-laws and I’ve become actually very accepting of that. They love my sons and support them and they are very nice, sane people. It couldn’t be better than that. And with one rare exception, we got them all for Thanksgiving every year.
This year is just so discombobulated that all I can do is laugh. I truly have no choice but to go with the flow.
Oldest son and wife’s baby is due Nov. 25. So, they want all of us to have Thanksgiving at their house if the baby hasn’t come by then. Yay!
But youngest son and new wife say “oh, we can’t make it, we are going to her folks”; and then they will be in NZ and Australia for their honeymoon over his grad school winter break so they won’t be here for Christmas or New Years.
Naturally, baby will still be too young for us to expect them over here (one hour) for Christmas and her mom is likely to be with them at that point.
So, anyway…all I know right now is that “Christmas” will be in mid January after the kids get back from overseas.
We are going to be nomads this xmas, splitting the time out of state between my parents and my inlaws. We’ll have our little nuclear family xmas when we return home after xmas. Can’t say I’m looking forward to it.
Yeah… no clue. My mom’s cancer and in-laws Hospice Alzheimers (MIL) + age & heart disease (FIL) have us rarely on Plan A. Sometimes I swear we’ve gotten to Plan Z. My calendar has more things crossed out and/or changed than ever before.
I guess we’ll have it figured out by late Nov and mid Dec respectively.
Good thing none of us are sticklers on days or what “must happen” and we’re not big on needing to exchange much in gifts.
Looking good this year. D2 has a whole week home with me over Thanksgiving. She has a month at Xmas, too, and D1 and DIL are coming for several days at Xmas as well. I succeeded in buying a new tree this weekend (needed to downsize from the huge one I had before). All on track!
One SIL just gave birth to a premie baby last week, my sister is due the day after Christmas, and my other SIL the day after her. Since we’re the childless sibling, we’ll be bopping around from family to family as needed/wanted. Otherwise, we’ll be spending it by ourselves and with friends.
Oh, it’s been a mess for several years now. For Thanksgiving, S2 and his fiance will be at her home in Puerto Rico getting wedding things set up (wedding in February); S1 and wife (seven months pregnant by then) will have just moved to North Carolina, so we may go down to see them and her family. Or, we may go to our friends across town; we’re always invited and have spent numerous holidays with them. For Christmas, I have no idea – one boy in Wisconsin, the other one in NC, and us here in CT. So it might be me, DH, two dogs, and a turducken. The only one I really care about is Thanksgiving.
The older we get, the older our kids get and the more complicated their lives become. They’ve got jobs and kids and in-laws to contend with, so I understand that we’re not always at the top of the list anymore. I understand, but that doesn’t mean I like it.
One year, by choice, to accommodate kid’s needs, we had Christmas two months late. Full on Christmas- tree from a cut your own lot, fully decorated the house, full usual dinner, even had the usual “Christmas Eve” open house and invited neighbors, they got a real kick out of it, but being ‘all in’ made it feel much better to all of us. If you are celebrating in January, I would make it the real deal, full on, 100% committed to feel like real Christmas.
Sadly, local DD is going to be at the in laws for Thanksgiving and the far away kids are not coming home, it would be a perfect time to travel, but we cannot leave my mother alone and don’t have anyone set up who could stay with her that long. ;(
So far, we plan just to be home for the holidays. Our kids will both spend Christmas even and day with us. They haven’t given exact dates but S will likely spend a week or longer with us and D a month or longer. So far S’s GF plans to spend Christmas Eve and day with her extended family, not with S and us. We will see if anything changes.
DW and I (from the pacific NW) plus our kids and their SO’s (from the east coast) will be flying to California to celebrate my MIL’s 90th birthday, after which we’ll all (except MIL) return to our house for Christmas and hopefully New Years.
My son’s best friend from his youth is getting married a few days before Xmas. So, they will stay with me for a few days, then fly to her home on 12/24. I’m use to being without son and now fiancé for holidays, so I celebrate with friends and family.
I will be in Austin this Thanksgiving with my parents. We’ll be with my sister and her family. DH and oldest son will be by themselves in Maine, since other S is in Lebanon and D is in Italy.
D gets home on December 22, so Christmas will be our immediate family minus the kid in Beirut. My whole family from Texas has been up here the past three Christmases, so this will be quiet! Kind of looking forward to it.
We love hosting Thanksgiving and D, S and SIL will be flying in. We will also have several friends at our dinner - some of whom have been part of our “Thanksgiving family” for decades. Lots of fun!
Christmas is another story. D and SIL will be traveling to Florida to his parents house and S will be staying in London ( though he will go to a friends house). This will be the first Christmas in 28 years that it will just be me and H. We would love to travel, but my leave at work is wiped out.
We mostly just gift the kids money at Christmas but we are big on stockings. I plan to have them filled and ready to give to them on Thanksgiving weekend. They won’t be expecting that so don’t tell!
I will have all 3 kids plus my DIL for Thanksgiving and Christmas. S2 and DIL will be here just for the day on Thanksgiving and for 20 hours on Christmas. S3, who lives in SF will be with us 5 days at Thanksgiving and 5 days at Christmas. I think for 2018 I had all 3 kids in the same place for a total of 5 days. I have to take what I can get.
It is a basic expectation that all of my sisters and I will get together with my parents for Christmas. It does not need to be Christmas day, just during the season and we all take turns hosting. H, S, and I moved halfway across the country this past January and it is my turn to host.
My D, who lives in the same state as my parents and sisters, is getting married in my state the weekend after Christmas. She is inviting my parents but not my sisters to her wedding.
So, we are driving over 2000 miles to see H’s sisters for Thanksgiving, where D and her fiance will also be. Then we will drive to see my parents and my sisters the weekend after Thanksgiving, have a meal in a church basement, call that Christmas, drive home and prepare for a wedding. D will spend Christmas with her fiance’s family out east, then fly here sometime, not sure when, to get get married a few days after Christmas.
At some point in there we will have our nuclear family Christmas, with future son in law and maybe his family, too.
So JUST as we were discussing “maybe this year we’ll do something totally different since nobody is around” and I pouted but then suddenly my heart skipped a beat thinking “maybe I don’t need a tree! This could be good!..”
…kids announce they’ll be home…
Finding it hard to win or lose. It’s all good!
I dislike thinking about the holidays. I have no siblings and my H’s siblings live out of state and never want to travel to see us, usually they go to their inlaws. My inlaws are gone and my folks are in assisted living near us but have lots of medical issues that make having them in the house for the day a lot of work.
Growing up I always loved having a houseful of cousins for the day. Sadly none of that is available for us now. And most of our friends have local-is family so we have not been able to establish new traditions with them. I’ll be glad when the holidays are over.
@VaBluebird why can’t you expect th new grand baby to see you on Christmas? My S was born 2 weeks before Christmas and we drove to my parents on Christmas eve for the traditional big dinner and then all went to church before driving home that night. They were over an hour away. In some ways it’s easier to travel with a young baby as they can sleep anywhere and don’t need much in the way of food, especially if she is nursing!
@surfcity , I am projecting about them being tucked in with the baby. We haven’t really discussed it. If they want to come here, of course it would be great. Lots of people don’t want their newborns out and about for the first several weeks.
We are going to D1’s apartment for Thanksgiving. She has been doing Thanksgiving for few years now. We are going to have a full house with my mother, brother, girls’ SOs, D2’s law school friends (who can’t go home) and few of my girlfriend’s kids.
For xmas we are all flying down to an island for a week before xmas because my mother sold her large home this year. There will be 15 of us. The girls and I are coming back on xmas eve to have our own dinner together. D1 and her H are going to her in-laws on xmas. D2 and I are going out to dinner with a good friend and her mother on xmas day.
Fortunately our family has never been hung up on dates for celebrations.
We’ve moved birthdays around, Christmas around, Thanksgiving around in order to celebrate an occasion as family as long as I can remember. When I was in elementary school we just shoved the birthday date to a good weekend so we could party. (Okay there was recognition but the PARTY got moved!)
Can’t be there for TG? We’ll have it again next week. Christmas? Our house, then yours in a week.
Birthdays? Not a problem!
Maybe it’s a bit lackadaisical for many but it certainly simplifies life.
The only one I really care about is Thanksgiving.