Flexible and creative is the name of the game, especially as life changes with births, deaths, moves, etc. We have our set up for now and I don't 100% love our compromises, but I know they will change again for various reasons. I had to give up my version of thanksgiving, but we go to my families lake house for the remainder of the weekend. So I gave up a meal but get the rest of the weekend. By redefining thanksgiving in my head to include the full weekend rather than the one meal, it balances out a little more easily. So it may involve adding traditions to the ones already in place. We are Jewish so we claimed a night of Chanukah to host. Since you don't celebrate Christmas, maybestart a tradition of hosting the family for December 25. Don't try to make it into Christmas, but have a family day, and cook or order infood, rent movies, play games with the kids etc.

My family always gets together, but we are very flexible with the day. It doesn't have to be the 25th. That way, you can do your own special thing with your family, and the next day (or the day before), we have a big dinner and exchange gifts between the adult siblings and cousins. I think it's the best of both worlds.

Anonymous wrote:We spend TGiving with my husbands family and Christmas with mine. My husband is Jewish, so we always do it this way. Works out very nicely for me.

Yeah, I married a man from another country whose family is another religion. There are literally no holidays that overlap, it's wonderful.

Probably not useful for the OP though.

We spend TGiving with my husbands family and Christmas with mine. My husband is Jewish, so we always do it this way. Works out very nicely for me.

OP here - I have no desire to exclude the in laws; I actually asked them to join us at our home. They don't want to do so. My whole family will spend it at our house, if we're here.

Anonymous wrote:So Op do you ever celebrate thanksgiving with your own family? it sounds like you do from your last sentence.

I am not sure why you would celebrate with your family but then get upset with DH for wanting to celebrate with his family. Or maybe I am missing something.

I am with your DH. I think thanksgiving is a time to be with other and particularly family. Just DH, me and the kids at thanksgiving would be kind of like any other day. I love getting together with family and think those relationships are important ones.

If you stayed in town and did Thanksgiving your way last year then this year it would make sense that you do what DH wants. Maybe alternate years, or if spending it with others isn't important to you, then have DH take the kids and go to his family's place and you can enjoy your holiday free solitude.

Not the OP, but this sounds. Amazing. I love being with family for holidays, but mine are out of state and so is the family of my DH. However, his are much closer about 5 hours away. I don't mind them, but they are the worst to be around. I dread it. My MIL is batshit crazy. My BIL and SIL never comes see them...to give you an idea. I still want my kids to be involved though. Even though I can't stand MIL and know she doesn't care for me, I would be willing to 'suck it up' for the kids....but then they always EXPECT us to come and demand we do things their way. Yeah, not so much....

We stayed home last year and when I did go visit my family with DH, his family drove down to crash in as well. God forbid they weren't involved in something. PP, maybe you are onto something...

So Op do you ever celebrate thanksgiving with your own family? it sounds like you do from your last sentence.

I am not sure why you would celebrate with your family but then get upset with DH for wanting to celebrate with his family. Or maybe I am missing something.

I am with your DH. I think thanksgiving is a time to be with other and particularly family. Just DH, me and the kids at thanksgiving would be kind of like any other day. I love getting together with family and think those relationships are important ones.

If you stayed in town and did Thanksgiving your way last year then this year it would make sense that you do what DH wants. Maybe alternate years, or if spending it with others isn't important to you, then have DH take the kids and go to his family's place and you can enjoy your holiday free solitude.

For me, seeing family was a tradition I wanted to keep. Excluding my parents on the holidays would mean that they didn't feel like the holidays, and no tradition that I made up would replace that. I hope that my daughter is not eager to stop celebrating the holidays with me when she is older. Also, it seems very important to your husband to see his family on the holidays, so whatever your nuclear family traditions are, they should include his. Eventually, the big family stuff will dissipate as more and more people start their own families/move/etc., and you can replace it with something that's meaningful in a different way.

Most families I know - and this is a common problem here - solve this by alternating. You get what you want one year, DH gets what he wants the next year, repeat.

Though personally, my extended family has been through a very rough couple of years with illnesses...and while at one point in my life it felt really important to me to have a big holiday that was all about me and my house, it isn't anymore.

I agree, OP, that over time the big meal will fall apart as the cousins get older and have their own families. Then you can fill that gap. You will have many years to fill that gap once it starts happening, but the Thanksgivings with that group all together and all healthy are limited. I guess I feel like maybe being indulgent is the right move here.

OP here: we don't celebrate xmas, so tgiving is really our only big winter holiday. all in-laws are well and able to travel and all can afford it easily, so those issues are not our issues.

Growing up, I didn't have grandparents or aunts/uncles nearby, so I grew up celebrating tgiving with 4 or 5 family-friends we were close to - we alternated between the different homes and it was so special when it was our turn to host. I want our kids to have that feeling, too.

thanks for all the different perspectives.

I think you need to be creative and flexible - and realize that as you said, his family dynamics will change over time as the rest of the cousins get older. You might be able to encourage that shift by proposing some alternatives that still honor their holiday traditions.

I have a big family and really value spending the holidays with them, but we're all adults now with our own kids so have come up with some new traditions. We usually try to plan a "Thanksmas" sometime between Thanksgiving and New Years where we can all get together, have a big meal like my mom used to make for Thanksgiving, and exchange gifts. This is rarely on an actual holiday.

Most years we go to my in-laws for Thanksgiving, although occasionally we'll do something with my family instead. I'd love to host myself, but it's not really in the cards.

For Christmas, we host my in-laws at our house for a big dinner and gift exchange one weekend in December. This is my consolation prize for giving up hosting Thanksgiving. For the actual holiday, we travel to my brother's house, and also manage to make it to a big party with my husband's extended family that is nearby. For the past 5 years we have said we are going to stop traveling and do Christmas at home, but every year we end up deciding to embrace the crazy travel and fun of large family celebrations one more time.

I think of it like this: how would I like my kids to celebrate the holidays when they are grown up, with families of their own? They will be free to do as they choose, but I would LOVE it if they grew up feeling the importance of keeping the grandparents in the loop vs. starting their own traditions that exclude DH and me.

We are young enough to travel comfortably; the grandparents are not. We do everything we can to go to them. That means thanksgiving with my mother, a 5 hour drive, and then Christmas split between the grandparents; that same 5 hour drive to my family, plus a flight and long drive to DH's family in the Midwest.

For Christmas there are plenty of traditions that we have established at home during the season, even though we are not home for the day itself. Decorating the house, making treats for friends, decorating a gingerbread house, advent calendar, parties with friends, etc.

It would be nice to have thanksgiving and Christmas at home, but not at the expense of being with family.

Typically we spend Thanksgiving with one family and then Christmas with the other. Then switch it up the next year.

I have this same issue with my DH and we're still looking for a solution. We can never travel during the holidays, and I have see my family the day after/before the holiday itself because he MUST be at his mother's dinner table for the holiday. I'm planning to let it go this year, but will put my foot down next year. We will have our own family then, and a new house, and we are spending it together as a family in our own home.

I feel quite torn: I would like to start out own family traditions in our own (new) home and my DH really clings to going home to his parents/cousins. he is the oldest of the cousins, so is the first to get married, have kids, have a home of his own. I think that, eventually, this tradition of ALWAYS having the pressure to spend tgiving with Dh's family, the kids will disperse and pick and choose which holidays they spend together and which they spend with their spouse's family and then on their own.

I'm curious to know how your family resolves/sees this issue.

I am so eager to make my own thanksgiving traditions, to set my own table, to make my own turkey. And while we did this last year (had to stay in town due to a wedding), DH was absolutely miserable at not being with his family. It ended up being a terrible wknd b/c he walked around in a total funk.

(of note, my mother is more than happy to give up hosting in favor of any one of her kids hosting. And my siblings are both younger, but want to have tgiving at my house, so in that sense, I have it "easy")