Holiday Negotiations

Happy Memorial Day Weekend, to all of you in the United States! According to estimates by the American Automobile Association, more than 80% of the 38 million Americans traveling out of town this weekend will do so by car. That’s up from last year despite record gas prices.

Why am I telling you this? Because I get to say, “Boy am I glad I’m not one of them!” You see, shortly after we got married, my parents moved out of state. Many of our Memorial Day weekends this past decade have been spent on the highway driving south for many hours. (Interestingly both my parents and we lived less than 10 or 15 minutes off the same Interstate highway; it was the 500 or so miles between our exit and theirs that was the killer.) If it wasn’t Memorial Day, it was Labor Day… or Thanksgiving… or Christmas… or Arbor Day (my personal favorite of the more obscure holidays).

Not so this year! My parents have moved back into town. But that doesn’t really solve the problem younger married couples tend to face, does it? It only changes the equation. The question remains: Who’s parents are we spending [INSERT NAME OF HOLIDAY] with this year?

Always a tough one, isn’t it? We got pretty lucky in this regard. For the biggie, Christmas, my family are Christmas Eve people, whereas Kerri’s are Christmas Day celebrants. Anymore, since the amount of family that is actually in town can generally all fit around the same table (kids excepted), and since my family and hers get along quite well, joint holiday’s are not only possible but probable. After all, the best kind of choice is one you don’t have to make, right? What else explains the enduring popularity of Neopolitan ice cream?

But what if you do if you have to make a choice? Say, your extended families don’t get on that well… or each side has their own traditional large gatherings… or one side does live out of town. (If both sides live out of town, I think it’s probably easier, because you can always opt out of all travel and keep the ledger even if you know what I mean.) Or consider the following purely hypothetical situation: your long-lost brother actually returns home for Christmas… and he picks the same one as your spouse’s family reunion where all the cousins from all across the country are flying in to great-grandma’s. (We haven’t actually encountered that one, but time may yet bear out my gift of prophecy.)

Here’s my one piece of advice: Make your own decision ahead of time, make it early, and stick with it. You’re guaranteed to get pressure from both sides of the family asking you to pick them. And if there’s one thing families are good at it’s applying pressure, right? Passive-aggressive, guilt-trip laden behavior is almost unavoidable in even the most well adjusted and best intentioned of families. So you and your spouse have to get on the same page before the pressure gets hot and heavy. In fact, I recommend nailing down the next six or seven Christmases right now.

Try to be fair to both sides. Do your best to anticipate extra-special situations. And finally, repeat after me: “We cannot and will not keep all of the in-laws happy all of the time.” The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can stop worrying and make the best of every holiday no matter where you spend it.

images: traffic | ice cream