I'm sad that...

musikbx

Cate, your request doesn’t sound unreasonable to me. Maybe I’m being biased here, but it seems a little lame that you have to rush through your family’s gift opening so you can be on the road by 7:00 AM. Particularly if his family hasn’t even started to eat dinner by the time you’re there.  Is there any way you could ask your family to open presents a little earlier, and his family to do dinner a little later so that you guys could have time to enjoy both without feeling rushed?

I understand the difficulties in splitting time between families during the holidays. We have agreed to alternate between Christmas in Germany and Christmas in the US. His birthday is two days before Christmas, and last year and he wanted to spend his thirtieth birthday and the holidays in Jamaica. Now I’m not complaining, but it messed up the rotation. So I am missing American Christmas for the second year. Though if we had stayed in the US, we would be missing German Christmas for the third year in a row.

 

Splitting time between families can be very delicate and complicated. I imagine that the situation will only be more complex once children are in the picture. It’s frustrating, but it’s better to start working these things out now.

calindi

Thanks, Musikbx.  We had a long talk about it last night, and we have it figured out.  He's going to tell them we'll be there at 3pm so we can at least have an hour to open gifts with my family, and we're going to try to leave on the 28th but if his family is actually paying attention to him (and it's not just the two of us hanging out alone), then we might stay until the morning of the 29th, but we'll be home by noon on the 29th so I at least get the afternoon with my brother.

What hurt my feelings is when we were talking about it, he said, "Maybe we should just do separate holidays next year."  I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.  We've already decided that when we have children, we're having people come to us.  There's no reason to make a child be in the car for 5 hours on Christmas Day, and there's no reason to choose between families - they want to see the grandchildren open presents, they are more than welcome to visit!

I imagine it's even more tricky when the families are on different continents or flying distance away.  I'm sorry you have to miss a second year with your family!