I live 1200 miles from my family, so I’m spared things like birthdays and so on. My cousin is a wiccan, so no christenings!
I’m sorry to miss birthdays and whatnot with my cousin and best friend.
But lordy, I do not miss holidays. My parents are divorced (and get along quite well), so holidays are a merging of mom, dad, and stepmom, plus my fascist idiot brother and his dour wife, and brother’s teenaged kid. That’s a lot to put up with.
I have a great time at my cousin’s Christmas breakfast, though. It’s just fun and light-hearted, partly because she’s banned the family assholes.
I try to attend if possible, but if not, well, I’m often away and my paternal family considers that quite normal (my relatives or formers include marine ship captains, a nurse with Doctors Without Borders, missionaries, professional artists and sportsmen…). At one point I warned that side of the family that if they kept treating me as my mother’s SO rather than as “one of the cousins”, Mom would start attending weddings by taxi. They took note and now put us in different tables or in one where she’ll be the oldest, not the second-youngest.
The maternal side is a lot less likely to have events, and if they have a problem with me being several thousand kilometers away, they’re welcome to pay my invoice for the workdays I’d have to miss. Since their preferred conversational subjects are money and personal offenses, as well as personal offenses over money, that threat works out well. They don’t know how much I charge but they’re sure it’s more than they want to pay. I’ll attend what I can, but I’m not going to take six flights to attend a great-uncle’s funeral, or the christening of a third-cousin’s baby that I won’t see again for years.