Assuming you drive (so space isn’t an issue) to be with family for Christmas.
Obviously, any gifts for people you are driving to be with need to be brought along.
Do you bring along Christmas presents that are for the people you live with? Do you carry with you the presents for your spouse/SO, or children, or do you open them at home either before or afterwards. Assume that you won’t be making a day trip, so “Open at home Christmas morning, then travel” isn’t an option.
It depends. If everyone’s getting an iPod or a piece of jewelry or a gift card, sure I’ll bring them. But (using last year as an example,) if the gifts are a 42" television, an xBox, and such, it’s just not feasible. In that case, we had our personal exchange at home, and took family gifts with us. There would have been no way to transport all of the grandkids and their gifts from Mimi and Papa otherwise! (Clothes, toys, bikes, etc. My mom-in-law is a little excessive! Thank goodness my folks know the joys of cash!)
By next year, when Lily is old enough to understand Santa, we’ll have to be more careful. Fortunately, our kids are the only grands on Tony’s side, and the only non-adult grands on my side of the family, so we kind of have the big vote on where to celebrate Christmas until our parents aren’t able to make the two-hour trip to visit.
We travel from the UK to Canada every year and luggage/gifts are always a nightmare. I 'm learning tho…I concentrated this year on North American retailers, buying online and shipping to my sister’s place. Stuff I bought in the UK for my kids I brought with…things like music and DVDs. Anything larger or heavier than that stayed home and we will open them on New Year’s Eve. I used to bring with me the things for my sisters and parents and mail them when I got to Canada (some are on either ends of the country) now I bite the bullet and pay for express shipping. Now I’m nice and relaxed because I’m done and hubby’s running around like chicken with his head cut off!
I’m sure parents haven’t learned their lesson tho…one year both my mom and dad bought me a bathrobe and I had to buy a new suitcase to bring them home…I’m sure this year will be no different :-/
I have Amazon ship it directly to them.
It depends on how easy they are to obtain where I’m starting from vs back home. I’ve even been known to purchase presents my brothers or mother were giving, as it was easier to find them where I was.
The most extreme case was for a specific request but not a specific date: there had been a tiny blurb on a magazine about these American cartoons whose protagonist was a little girl and whose main educational target was achieving bilingualism for Spanish-speaking immigrants; Mom thought she looked real cute, so when I was moving to the US she asked me for a doll. The Doras I found in stores were ugly, but I was able to get a dancing, singing Dora off ebay that was absolutely cute and bring it to my mother.
Several months later, her sister saw it, tried to claim it and finally asked for another, so I went back to ebay and purchased an identical doll from the same vendor.
This year those same dolls are being sold in Spain - they’d never been so far (we would have noticed, that doll is a hit with everybody), although Dora has been on Spanish TV for years.
No. It’s just the two of us at home, and we’re doing family things in different corners of the state on the 24th and 25th, so we established a tradition that we do our own Christmas thing at home on the 23rd or thereabouts. We get Chinese food, drink bubbly, and open our presents to one another.
Yes. My wife and I spend Christmas Eve here in Chicago, with her family, then, on Christmas morning, we drive up to Green Bay, and spend Christmas Day with my family. Presents are opened in both places, and she and I typically will give each other presents in both places. Thus, I will have some gifts to her which will be opened here on Christmas Eve, and some gifts to her which will get loaded in the car (along with our gifts to my family), and opened up in Green Bay.
We would travel every year for Christmas the first 15 years we were married. We would barely have room in the car to bring back everything the kids got from relatives so we would never bring our family gifts along. It was an unofficial contest for a while for the childless people to get huge items for the people with children.
Once everyone was packed into the car for the trip my husband or I would pretend to forget something inside and would put out the gifts from Santa. We told the kids that Santa left the presents for them at our house because he knew we didn’t have room to bring them back. They loved it because they got another present opening occasion. We usually bought them something new to play with on the long drive and we would let them open it ahead of time.
In our family Santa only brought one toy for each child, the rest was from us.