I live 3 hours drive from where I grew up and where my mum still lives and every year when they were growing up we did Xmas at mums house with the kids. My uncle, her brother always came over and even when his son moved to Sydney, 8 hours drive away, he made it back each year to Xmas at his aunties house. It was a tradition.
I’m working on getting mum to move to the big smoke now she’s getting old, so I might be doing Xmas at my place for the family for the next few years.
When my wife and I married over 20 years ago we made the decision there and then that we were not travelling anywhere to anyone’s house on Christmas day.
We stuck to it and it is the best decision we ever made. We then moved a 6 hour drive away from family and this only reinforced that decision, ditto when we had kids. We love our small, peaceful Christmases. We can do what the hell we want, when we want and no-one is obligated to entertain us nor us to them…bliss…for one day at least, then we all start to get bored and and the cabin-fever sets in quickly.
So for the last few years we now go for a two-week skiing holiday over xmas and new year. That is a 14 hour drive but at least we have peace, quiet, fresh air, exercise, guaranteed snow and hot spas and absolutely no obligation to do anything we don’t fancy.
Side question to New Yorkers.
My experience is that in NYC apartments tend to be rather small so how do you accommodate Christmas visitors?
Hotels?
Question - How crowded do ski resorts get at Christmas?
I have a 2 year old and we traveled to my brother’s for Thanksgiving and Christmas which was about an hour away. The drive isn’t bad but to me it’s about the principal. Why should I travel and he not? Our place is bigger, nicer, and has more parking. I was going to stand firm and not go anywhere but my wife broke and we went. It wasn’t unpleasant, but still…
Other than that we do holidays at our house.
We typically travel. My holidays are typically spent driving the baby and his mommy around the tri-state area visiting relatives on both sides of the family. Everyone lives within about 3 hours drive and the baby usually just settles in for the ride so I don’t mind it.
Guests would typically have to stay in hotels.
I do have one friend with a 3 bedroom penthouse with 3 balconies. Fortunately they throw like 20 parties a year.
But people with smaller appartments or who don’t want to clean up afterwards might host a party at a restaurant, bar or other venue.
My brother and his wife made a hard and fast rule after their first child was born “We will not travel for holidays.” Everyone is welcome at their house, and if both sides show up, all the better, but they are staying put.
The grandparents have kicked and whined occasionally, but my brother makes sure they get to see the kids at least twice each year, and they have accepted the pronouncement accordingly.
I think this sort of hard and fast rule is a great way to handle it. Both our families are high on the dysfunction scale, and between scattered extended family and divorced parents, there are about six different cities folks want them to visit. So it could have been an absolute nightmare if they hadn’t cut it off at the pass.
We ski in Austria and the crowds are not too bad if you stick to the small village resorts. If you go to the higher glaciers like the Kitzsteinhorn, that can get very busy. Christmas Day itself tends to be one of the quieter days on the slopes
We made a commitment when our firstborn was a baby that we would always have Christmas morning at our house. It has worked out great (neither set of grandparents is local).
We sometimes visit before or after Christmas, but if you have an inflexible rule people seem to be much more accepting than if you try to make excuses every year or once in a while.
Anyway, works for us.
Thanks for the suggestion - I just bought it.
Any advice on how to establish a basically immutable policy of having Christmas at home? Knowing my parents, I think that they come at this issue on two grounds, which I need to somehow address or deflect.
One, pragmatism: they (and my brother, who lives far away) all have big houses, whereas I have a little apartment that can’t accommodate house guests, so if we’re going to be together at Christmas it can’t be in NYC.
Two, fairness: why should they NEVER get to be with us at Christmas? (The added wrinkle, of course, is that my wife’s family lives in town, so doing Christmas in our home means that my in-laws get to be with us for at least part of the day, which my parents likely view as unfair.) In their minds, something like an alternating schedule makes the most sense. But from my wife’s and my perspective, Christmas at their place is literally a lost year. I’m more adept at suppressing negative emotions and biting the bullet, but for my wife this is just too unbearable because Christmas is her favorite day of the year and, let’s just say, a Very Big Deal.
I understand and appreciate where they’re coming from. But my position in all this is that there’s no rule that says we have to be together at all at Christmas, and that we have a very strong, overriding desire to celebrate this holiday in our own house. But I don’t really know how to express that in a way that they’ll comprehend.
My brother and his family used to visit one set of parents at Christmas and the other set for New Year.
I have friends who have essentially bargained their way out of this; they picked a more random time of the year (sadly, you may have to think ahead to the future of school schedules, btw) and said "okay, we will ALWAYS come for Dad’s birthday (August) and stay for a week, instead of rushing, rushing, rushing to get there for Christmas every other year and only staying for a weekend. The key here is to pick something that would be important to your parents, that you could bear to do. Bonus points if you pick something that your brother could (and would want to) also commit to. Depending on how various family members approach things, you could also point out that it is much more costly to travel around the holidays than at (random time you pick).
Yeah, the part about your in-laws having more holiday time with you due to proximity is something you can’t really mitigate. I get why your parents are upset about this (it sounds like you do, too) but that is reality.
Making matters worse (for my parents), my brother’s in-laws ALSO live in the same town as he does. And his wife is an only child, so they’re not keen on leaving her parents alone for Xmas. Moreover, my brother’s in-laws are also extremely Christmas-oriented, fun/festive etc. and are actually pretty religiously observant too. So, basically everyone has very strong incentives to NOT go to my parents’ for Christmas. They don’t want to come to NY, rather understandably. The natural equilibrium state AFAICT is for them to go spend Christmas with my brother, and for my wife and me to do our own thing. That’s where I’m trying to steer this whole thing, hurting as few feelings as possible.
Thanks for the suggestion. I might try to come up with some bargaining chip, whether it’s Easter, New Year’s, or another random time of year.
My kids are teenagers, and both grandparents are in town.
We would go to my parents for Christmas Eve, but my rule was, and it would be the same in your circumstances - that with kids Santa age, we don’t leave our own home on Christmas Day. People are welcome to join us, but we are home.
Santa is too hard to travel around, the kids are over excited and over stimulated, no one gets much sleep - its open presents and jammie day.
It stuck and we remain home on Christmas Day even now with teenagers. I suspect that when the kids go off, we will go to my mother in laws as she is getting old enough that there aren’t many years of travel in her.
My mother in law is an odd duck though. When we were first married and did the holiday negotiations, she really wanted Thanksgiving and we said “OK, Thanksgiving is yours” - it was never a big holiday on my side. Then she proceeded to make other plans, travel, give us last minute notice on “we decided to go to Susan’s” (lets find a turkey and plan full Thanksgiving on Wednesday!) and generally be unpredictable in her availability for her holiday. So it became “Thanksgiving is a free for all” - and after twenty years of marriage, she says “I thought I was supposed to get Thanksgiving!” ARRRGH.
This.
We do make an effort to go other times (Easter, usually) but we just can’t have Santa searching all over.
Plus the holiday traffic/airports/etc. Car seats, portable cribs, schlepping hidden presents to grandma’s house and schlepping them back. Yuck.
Commit to another time when you can go and it’s not so crazy.
Of course, we had both sets of grandparents away, so it seemed fair.
Of course they travel, so they can inflict strangers with their children running up and down the aisles of the plane and kicking the seats of others.
Donald, to usher in this new tradition, you might want to offer your inlaws, as a gift, a two night’s stay at a local hotel.
My FIL did that for us so we wouldn’t have to drive back late at night and could have a glass of wine at dinner. They do have one extra room. But fitting two adults and one kid there… it was just enough of an option to make an hotel stay seem unneeded, but the room was also so small that staying there just was unpleasant.
Anyway, FIL suggested he’d pay for a hotel room three years ago. It was a bit of a taboo for all involved. At first, he thought we’d be insulted, and we were a bit uncomfortable with how much that would cost him. But we just did it, and it was the best idea ever.
I thought that staying in a hotel over Christmas would be depressing, but it is actually the opposite. It is relaxing, feels like a luxury mini-vacation. We get alone-time away from the family during the weekend, which keeps us all sane.
And you wouldn’t believe how nicely hotels are decorated for Christmas. The kid loves the hotel breakfast buffet, with all the stuff he can choose, it’s like a kids paradise. And hotels are just the right kind of busy at Christmas; not empty, but not that busy either, because most people still do the crazy travel/ stay with relatives thing.
Family hotel stays at Christmas ROCK! Your in-laws just have to get over the taboo that it is inhospitable, or an unnecessary expense to stay there, instead of at your house. Besides, what else were you gonna give them in the way of a gift?
When I was a kid it was 1600km (Canberra to Bundaberg) or 600km (Canberra to (almost) Melbourne) - hated it. 1 or 2 days drive in a fully loaded stationwagon with no aircon during summer 
These days my FIL lives 2 1/2 hours drive away, he’s retired and loves driving so he either comes down a for a few days or we wait until after New Years and then go up to his place for a long-weekend.
The rest of the family on both sides is local - which makes for an exhausting Xmas day but it’s at least survivable with young kids.
Typically, we drive 500 miles each way to visit my in-laws for Thanksgiving and 800+ miles each way to visit my parents at Christmas. We also each take the kids to our respective parents’ house in the summer, so each set of grandparents gets two visits per year.
I generally hate the holidays because of all of the logisitics involved, but if we didn’t make use of those days off work and school, we wouldn’t have time for as many visits with the grandparents and still have time for a proper vacation.