Splitting Holidays

May 26, 2010, By Craig J. Heimbuch 0 comments

Craig J. Heimbuch

Holidays can get complicated and sometimes cause huge rifts in a family if you and your spouse/partner actually have nearby relatives who you might want to spend time with on Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, Passover, Festivus or any other day that you and your spouse/partner consider special.

The angst vanishes if there’s no real competition for your presence because the relatives really don’t want to see either of you or are being held in a maximum-security facility that discourages visitors from bringing hams. And if relatives are hundreds or thousands of miles away, it’s not too difficult to avoid any friction by simply saying you can’t make the trip for a variety of reasons that may or not be true. 

The cost of the travel or conflicts with your work schedule are usually accepted as adequate excuses for not making the 1,400-mile excursion to Aunt Ethel’s for Thanksgiving. You will not get a pass from Aunt Ethel or anyone else in the family if you tell them that Thursday is bowling night or that you don’t want to miss an episode of “Parks and Recreation” even though you know upfront that it will be a rerun on Thanksgiving night.

The question of where to spend the holidays always gets most complicated when there are two sets of parents competing for the presence of a son or daughter who live nearby. That competition increases exponentially if grandchildren are involved. Grandparents are always thrilled to see the grandchildren. They have come to terms with the fact they are indeed old enough to have grandchildren and that it’s time to quit devoting each weekend to performances by Grateful Dead tribute bands.

It might seem that the simplest solution would be to rotate the holidays so that the son/daughter and spouse/partner and the grandchildren spend one Thanksgiving with one family and the next Thanksgiving with the other family. But that won’t be fully embraced if Thanksgiving happens to be the one day of the year when one entire family – including 88-year-old Uncle Leo – assembles for a special get together. Once a year is, after all, awfully important and if you miss one year, well, Uncle Leo isn’t getting any younger.

Splitting up the day – trying to satisfy both sides of the carefully balanced family equation – is another option that might seem like a good solution, although it certainly has its drawbacks.  Rather than just spending a leisurely day with one family, it’s artificially sliced into at least two parts, which means that one spouse/partner may have to announce at some point, “I’m sorry. I cannot pass the green bean casserole as you have requested because we have to leave immediately so that we are on time for appetizers at my mother’s house, which is, according to my rough calculations, 21.74 miles from here.” The splitting time strategy gets slightly more complicated than splitting the atom if either set of parents has gone through a divorce and has formed yet another family that is competing for a holiday visit.

Generally speaking, there’s no simple solution to the holiday visit dilemma for anyone who’s within an easy drive of two families. Again, living well beyond that “easy drive” distance (think Lagos, Nigeria) is a workable strategy as is avoiding any close relationship that could eventually lead to difficult questions about where to spend a holiday. Yet another approach is to establish yourself and your spouse/partner as hosts for all of the holidays. That would allow you to sidestep any of these tough questions and force your guests to make these difficult decisions. It could prove to be the perfect solution to this difficult question. Or you could wind up home alone.

Craig Heimbuch is the Editor-in-Chief of ManoftheHouse.com and the author of "Chasing Oliver Hazard Perry." He is a Barefoot Proximity employee.