Holidays can be tricky for anyone, in any family situation. Married couples without kids, however, face a special conundrum: with whom to spend the day(s)? Again, this can be tough for anyone, but childless marrieds face a particular pressure: you don’t have kids, so it falls to you to drive sometimes long distances to attend the family get-together.
Of course that returns us to the initial question: with whose family do we spend the holidays? We pick one side of the family for Thanksgiving and the other for Easter, because Jon’s parents and my parents live far enough away from each other that it doesn’t make sense trying to split one meal between two places.
Christmas sees us driving across Pennsylvania to spend the relevant days with both of our families. We try to give both our sets of parents equal access to us during the prime days: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and the day after Christmas. Sometimes we end up spending a little extra time with my parents, but that’s due to the next set of shenanigans.
Jon’s extended family is much smaller than mine, so they do all of their holidays together for the most part. Sometimes there is a big group meet up the week before Christmas, and that can be difficult for us to attend. My parents are still splitting their holiday time between each of their families, who in turn have holidays they alternate with their own families. It’s like looking into a room of mirrors, or opening a set of nesting dolls. The required coordination is dizzying if I want to try to see all of my family members even once a year.
Complicating matters further is my own personality. I’ve admitted before that I’m inclined to worrying too much, and my overdeveloped sense of guilt partners it. No matter with whom we spend a holiday, I always feel bad that we’re not doing so with the family members that are left out at that particular time. I know I need to let go of that, but my feelings don’t entirely come out of nowhere.
No matter how reasonable or understanding our sets of parents are about the holiday shenanigans, I know that they’re always sad when they don’t get to see their children on a special day. They also wish they could see us more. But we live a tricky distance away from our families: far enough that the journey is quite wearying, but close enough that the trip is feasible.
Constantly having to make these trips gets tiring, especially given that the big holidays for our families – Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter – are all clustered within one six-month period instead of being spread out more throughout the year. I don’t want to complain a lot because I love seeing our families, but it just makes the holidays more stressful than I wish they could be.
I can’t decide whether or not it will get better once we have children. We won’t have to travel as more, but then we might see more people less. The guilt might ratchet up, unless I can figure out how to stem it in the meantime.
Of course I know all of the things to do: keep doing the best I can, keep spreading holiday time out equally among families, and realize that the rest will just have to follow. Life isn’t perfect but our families realize that, and it makes the time we can spend together all the more special.
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*(The above image by digitalart is from freedigitalphotos.net).