Thanks for starting this. I am in my second thanksgiving divorce and I worry so much about my kids. Things I always try to do are (1) make sure that I build them up for going to dad’s for the second holiday part - like “wasn’t that fun? now you get to have a big meal and see people and do it all over again with your dad and he’s really looking forward to it!” and big smiles all around (2) never let the kids hear us deciding or disagreeing on what time and who picks up and stuff like that so they don’t feel like trading cards (3) make sure the basic holiday structure is the same and (4) let them know as far in advance as they can relate what we are doing so they don’t get surprised and finally (5) cry in the bathroom or after the kids are asleep, cause I’m gonna cry but they don’t have to.
But after all that I still have to rely on the resiliancy of children and hope for the best. It sucks. I’ll be reading for any responses to pick up what tips I can.
Sort of ditto, except that I don’t think my family is insane per se. It’s just that juggling two sides of the family, plus the SO’s family (thank God his parents are still married) means that this time of year I feel pulled in many different directions. It doesn’t help that my birthday is 3 days before Christmas.
Over the years I have had some horrible holidays, and some great ones. A few times I’ve said “fuck it” and done my own thing. I’ve gotten to the point (at almost 34) that I just remember that I am now an adult. I get to pick where I go.
Right now, my mom and I get on well, as we always have. Right now, I’m a little irritated with my dad - we’ve had our rough patches, and while it has been worse, it’s also been a lot better. He is getting absorbed into his new wife’s family to an extent that he’s living his (and thus mine) behind. And I miss that. I am tired of being disappointed.
So what I’ve taken to doing with him is saying “here is where I’ll be” which is a place he is also invited. If you want to see me, that’s where you show up. I don’t have time to drive all over Southern California checking off boxes of what set of parents I’ve seen today. If you don’t want to be there (like he won’t be on Thursday) you won’t get to see me. Oh well.
Anyway, that may or may not help your situation, but it’s been over 15 years since my parents initially separated (oh, mom asked dad to leave THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS) and I’m still dealing with the aftermath to this day. It’s not the happy answer, but it’s the real one. With any luck, your mileage will vary in a better way than mine has.
Well, my parents divorced when I was 20, and both quickly remarried. I deal with the holidays by…well, not thinking too much about the past. I just “went with it” and celebrated the new traditions with the new families to the best of my ability. That may not work for you, but it did for me. It helped that as much as possible, my mom kept some of our traditions, while adding in my step-dad’s family’s traditions.
I’m wavering again today. I’m back to the whole sit in my room or go to my shop and do nothing thing.
I guess it’s not so much that I’m concerned about my parents. It’s my grandparents. They live here too. I certainly don’t feel like celebrating anything, but I don’t want them to feel left out. So do I put up a brave front and throw a dinner that nobody probably wants to attend? Or do I just do my own thing?
ETA: I guess it boils down to this. I’m still mad at my dad for all of the crap that he’s pulled and for basically ruining the holidays for the rest of us. What I’m really trying to figure out is how to deal with the anger.
My parents separated when I was 7, and to me the idea of a mother and father living together in the same house seems odd. (How do the kids get any attention?)
I think a lot has to do with the attitude of the parents. My mom and dad made it a point to live in the same city until I went to college, and they shared custody. I was usually at my mom’s place for Christmas, but my dad came over early on Christmas morning for the present opening ceremony. 
I pity my brother’s situation though. He and his wife are both from broken homes and all four parents live in different cities from them and from each other. Theirs are very busy holidays!
Hmm, how to deal with the anger. That’s a tough one.
One thing I will say is that it is likely to fade over time. I mean, it may never go away. And if your parents are adversarial and your dad is a butthead, you may continue to be very mad at him.
My dad cheated on my mom, which is why they split. That’s part of the reason (IMHO) why my relationship with him has been troubled lo these many years. At some point the anger over that did kind of fade, and everyone moved on with their life. I have to deal with him as he is now, etc.
So in some respects, I think it can actually get easier.
My parents divorced when I was three and my sister was six. Both Mom and Dad re-married within the year. We’d spend Christmas with Mom and Easter with Dad; I didn’t like Christmas with Dad’s family. In fact, from the time my parents divorced until I was about 23, I didn’t spend another Christmas with them. They’re kind of screwy.
Thanksgiving isn’t the huge deal in Canada that it is in the US, and it’s a month earlier so it’s not the big holiday season kick-off. I don’t think I ever spent a Thanksgiving with Dad’s family until I was an adult.
I don’t have the anger anymore. I just let it go over the years. I wish I could help you do the same.
My parents divorced when I was about 18. Thanksgiving was never a problem, since we always ended up doing it at home with just our immediate family; Christmas–and getting together with my mum’s side of the family–was problematic.
Fortunately, my parents being pragmatic souls, we end up having two celebrations: one with Mum, Dad, and my brother, and one with my grandparents, aunt and uncle, and cousins. Two for the price of one and it all works out.
Second year with divorced parents and holiday planning. Dinner with mom one night, dinner with Dad another. And dinner with the in-laws last year, though that’s not necessary this year due to an impending divorce. And dinner with friends last year.
Christmas was slightly more problematic. We went to my dad’s the morning of Christmas Eve, and then all of us–including my half-brother, who’s my dad’s son and who did not grow up with us–went to my mom’s in the evening. Balancing the time that way was kind of difficult, especially considering that the family my dad had then married into was culturally different from my mom’s (my dad’s an only child, and my paternal grandparents are deceased). THEN my poor brother went to his mom’s–she usually does Christmas Day with him.
Tiring. Definitely tiring.
My parents divorced when I was about 12, and Dad promptly moved to another city. Basically we eneded up spending holidays with him and the rest of his side of the family, then come home to spend the rest of our vacation with Mom.
Things changed, as things do. Mom moved us closer to her family so she had more support and wasn’t so cut off.
Basically Thanksgiving is usually spent at home, we go over to Mom’s sister’s house for a big supper or we spend it at home and I make a ham (as we did this year). As Ginger said, Thanksgiving isn’t quite as big a deal up here, but as a kid we’d often go to Grandma’s since it was a long weekend.
Now that I’m grown we sort of do our own things. Dad works or is on the highway at Christmas, my brother is somewhere doing his own work. This year the plan looks like he’ll be down here for Christmas day and then we’ll be leaving with him on Boxing day for Grandma’s to spend a few days there to see everyone we can (Grandma, Great-grandma, Dad and step-mom for certain, maybe some cousins and more aunts and uncles) before I have to be back home and back to work.
It’s tough, but you learn to make new traditions and see people you want to see. With all of us grown and having jobs and in different areas of the province it involves a bit of work and arranging, and we may not always see them ON Christmas but sometime during the holidays*.
As for the anger… I can’t say how to deal with it. I always loved my father, but I was very bitter towards him as a child and hated his guts. In recent years I’ve managed to get him to tone down some things and he’s mellowed some which helps and now we get along okay (though don’t leave us in the same house for too long, or we start sniping at each other).
*I think this is what causes a lot of issues. People want their family around them on that particular day and don’t stop to think about the problems that can arise. The point of the holidays is IMO to spend them with your family, but who said you have to see them all on the same day? As a child the best part was getting several ‘Christmas mornings’ with different sides of my family. Trying to cram it all into one day is just stressful. Why not see them all on different days and get to spend TIME with them, not rushing through the rigamarole.
My parents divorced when I was about ten years old. In a charming holiday story, it was right around Christmas time and I was put to work cleaning the bathroom. I noticed it was getting late and asked my mother when dad was coming home. She just froze and quietly said “He didn’t tell you?”
The answer was that my father wasn’t coming home and was sort of supposed to let us kids know this and sorta-kinda decided to just skip out instead and leave the task to my mother. Sterotypically, he ran off with his secretary.
What’s kind of strange is that I don’t remember having a lot of opinion on it at all. My father worked nights for a dairy plant in the city and so, except for weekends, he usually wasn’t home when the rest of the family was up and about. And on the weekends he was usually golfing or at a game or other typical “father” stuff. I guess I just internalized it – I remember seeing a woman in grade school under the pretense of helping me work through some stuttering issues and finding out how I was coping with the school’s gifted program and, recently, my mom admitted that she was a counselor trying to poke and find out how I was handling the divorce. As I’ve grown older, I’ve pretty much written the thing off; I don’t have anything to really say to my father and I don’t expect he has anything to say that I’m interested in hearing. I invited him to my wedding at my mother & sister’s request but under the agreement that I was inviting him as a basic guest and not as the “father of the groom” or anything.
My sister was about 12 at the time and she took it very hard when he left and blames him for a lot of emotional turmoil. She since married, she had a reconciliation of sorts with him and invites him by for family events at her house such as Thanksgiving or my nephew’s birthday. Those events are about the only time I see him. I think she still stings from the rejection she felt from the divorce decades ago but she’s more or less made her peace with it.
For the longest time I perversely embraced the tragic “How I found out” story as a reason to hate Christmas and be depressed and shit. I don’t think I truely threw that off until my son was born and my Christmas holidays became about my family with him and not about the family I lost as a child. There’s a line at the end of Greg Lake’s song “I Believe In Father Christmas” where he says “Be it heaven or hell; the Christmas we get, we deserve”. Barring exceptional circumstances, I believe that’s true. If you’re looking for a reason to hate the holidays, it’s easy enough to find one and vindicate your being miserable for two months out of the year. But it’s not hard to find reason to be happy either. I wouldn’t dream of telling someone how long they’re allowed to feel bad about a horrible event in their life but I hope that, as time passes, you’ll let the present outshine the past when it comes to the holidays.
I’m not angry about my parents divorcing (it was for the good), but one of the few things I get a bit uptight about is Christmas.
I’m not a very Christmassy person anyway, and my family is pretty generally atheistic, but we’ve always done Christmas to a certain extent, and that’s fine. When my parents divorced, we lived fifty miles north of Sydney, and my dad then moved to Sydney. My sister and I had to be at both houses on Christmas Day, so my main memories on Christmas Day is of standing on a deserted railway platform in a deserted town with all the shops closed. And this to keep the adults happy (who didn’t have to do it), and not the kids.
So I grow up, get a job etc, and all that crap should be over. But was it? Nope.
Christmas remained drenched in family politics, and apart from replacing the deserted railway platform with a windswept and empty freeway, it was pretty much the same. Then, on top of this, I work for the post office. From about now until 10:15pm on Christmas Eve when I almost literally fall through the door of my flat exhausted, I am working like a demon. 6am Boxing Day, I’m back at work. No, Dad, I don’t want to drive an hour each way to see you and sit in a miserable little flat eating stale mince pies. Christmas is for kids - we’re both adults, I’ll come up another time. No mum, I am NOT driving 180 MILES EACH WAY to stay in a cabin. Yes, I have to work. No, mum I don’t have… let me finish… I don’t have to work Christmas Day itself, it’s true, but I’m not driving 360 miles just to satisfy some ancient family politics when I’m so exhausted from work.
And apparently ONE year about twenty five years ago, my mum and stepfather spent Christmas alone, and I still hear about it every year. I have tried pointing out that I have had a shit Christmas every year for that entire time.
So now, I stand my ground. I don’t do Christmas. Well, I will do it, but on the condition that I wake up and go to bed in the same house (mine), and I don’t travel more than a couple of miles, if that. If family want to see me, they can come to me. If that sounds arrogant, then it’s what I did for them for decades. And they never want to come, of course.
I issued my official edict today. We will have a Thanksgiving breakfast. This is sort of sadistic in a way because all of us would rather sleep in, but instead will have to be awake and dressed and travelling to my shop at an earlier than desired hour. In other words, everyone will be somewhat inconvenienced and perhaps I feel that this will put us all on a level playing field. After my merry breakfast I will head out to my boyfriends’ house and then we’ll go to his parents’ house for lunch or dinner.
All of this isn’t going to change my anger towards my dad. But I feel that I’ve made the best possible choice given the situation.
Just to update… Today was a success. My grandma proudly declared it the Best Thanksgiving Breakfast Ever.
Cheers to all!