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We don’t really decide ahead of time. It’s been strange and lucky – somehow, we’ve never both wanted to take the children at the same time. Christmas has been hard for me. He has his entire family come into town every year. They all stay at his place, like 18 relatives and cousins! My family is very segmented and nobody ever comes here, so it’s very quiet for me.

I think now the kids are older and they enjoy their cousins more, they realize I could go away and then we could have Thanksgiving together. I’m still available if they want to come over and get away from the house full of people but there’s not a lot of tugging or pulling. It’s all fallen into place.

I’ve changed the way I perceive holidays. They’re more of a retreat for me these days – a meditative time because it is very silent for me. I was serving wine in the Catholic church up until about seven years ago and I was steeped in Christianity. Now I’m not at all. Zero. I love my roots and I love what Jesus represents but I’ve made a complete break and changed so radically. His family, they’re all going to church so I think it’s more important for my children to celebrate Christmas with their father on Christmas Day.

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I have what I think is a more typical parenting plan – it does spell out which holidays are spent with which parent and what happens during summer vacation and so on. I’ve liked having that spelled out because I think it has saved some disagreements. It’s a fall back, a safety net. I don’t think having an open parenting plan would have worked for me, at least not at first.

Now, after three years, I think we’re getting to where we can be more flexible. We did a little bit of weekend swapping so I could go to the Blissdom conference, for example. Our plan calls for the children to be with one parent for Christmas Eve and with the other for Christmas Day and then the rest of their school vacation is split 50/50. That arrangement makes it challenging to go away and I’m hoping we could be flexible on that in the future.

A friend of mine has a parenting agreement that calls for her children to spend her birthday with her. Birthdays aren’t covered in my agreement. For the children’s birthdays, my ex and I start with asking our children what they’d like to do (remember my kids are now 16 and 14) and then we take it from there, making sure that both he and I get to have a birthday celebration with the child. It doesn’t matter to me if my children aren’t with me for my birthday but it does matter that we celebrate it together at some point. My ex grew up in a house were birthdays were just like any other day so it’s not a big deal for him. Me? I like to make birthdays special.

I think that flexibility my ex and I now have has come as we’ve adjusted to our new roles. We’ve learned to trust that we’re supporting each other in our parenting roles and we recognize that we each have a valuable role to play in our children’s lives. It’s like Holly said, Parenting after divorce gets easier with time. Well .. maybe what I meant by that headline is that partnering with your ex on parenting issues gets easier with time – the parenting itself definitely gets harder as the children get older … but that’s another story.

Photo Credit:

Sue’s parenting agreement calls for the children to be with one parent on Christmas Eve day and evening and then to go to the other parent’s home Christmas Eve night so they would wake up at the house where they would be spending Christmas Day. At first that meant separate Christmas celebrations but that changed later.

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When their dad came back into the picture, which was when my older daughter was a freshman in high school, then we started celebrating Christmas together. I guess the hurt wasn’t there so it was easier to be together and it was much easier for the kids. So if I have the children for Christmas Day, he comes over so we are all together and for two hours, you can do that.

Then we have four or five families – all of us moved here from some place else, none of us have family here and we always have Christmas Eve or Christmas Day dinner together. There was another friend who was divorced and frequently our days/years were on the same schedule. So that was our tradition and we would celebrate Easter, Christmas and Thanksgiving together.

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My agreement is similar to Sue’s and calls for the children to spend Christmas Eve through to 9 a.m. on Christmas Day with one parent and then Christmas Day through to 9 a.m. on December 26 or Boxing Day, as we Brits call it, with the other parent. And we do alternate years. Since we live in the same town that seems to have work well so far. We also don’t have family close by and that means we don’t have to deal with complications from trying to share the children with our respective families.

The children don’t seem to mind. In fact sometimes I think rather enjoy it because they get to open gifts on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

I can see where it would get complicated especially if you live further apart. And although we do have Christian backgrounds neither my ex nor I are churchgoers so that also means we’re not trying to accommodate religious ceremonies either. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas for me without roast turkey and all the trimmings but you can’t cook a 10-12 pound bird for yourself and two kids. Last year I solved that problem – my local store sold me a turkey quarter – worked great!

Now what’s prompted all these thoughts about the holidays? Well, I just got an email from my brother – he lives in South Africa. He wanted to know what I thought about going to England for Christmas 2010. It’s my dad’s 80th birthday next year but neither of us can get to England with our families to celebrate his birthday in September. A family reunion over Christmas sounds wonderful but it would call for some pretty major flexibility in our parenting plan. So should I mention it to him and get his reaction or should I just wait a while? What do you think?

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Cinderella's Castle, Courtesy of Disneyland

When the kids were little we split Christmas up so one parent had the kids Christmas Eve day and evening and then they went late that evening to the other parent’s house so they would wake up in the morning at the house they were going to have Christmas Day at. That first year the kids were with me Christmas Day.

Well, I had decided that we would go away for our first Christmas and we would go to Disneyland but I kept it a surprise. So I put the tickets in the kids’ stockings because they always opened their stockings first and we were flying out on Christmas Day. Oh my god, they were besides themselves – ‘We’re going to Disneyland!’ They couldn’t believe it.

I also didn’t tell them we were going with another family. So we went to the airport and then when all the kids saw each other and figured out what was going on, it was just too much. It was so much fun.

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I wanted to post this story now because I figure some of you might be thinking about Thanksgiving and the Holidays and wondering how to celebrate and Sue’s wonderful surprise might give you a few ideas. I actually don’t remember how we celebrated our first Christmas but I do remember the Christmas before. The children knew we were separating but my ex hadn’t moved out. I took the children to England to visit my family and we were supposed to be back on December 23 so it was a short trip. I say supposed because that was the year Denver got hit with a blizzard on the 23rd. The airport was closed and our flight was canceled. Well, we couldn’t get on another flight for a week so that meant staying in England longer. It turned out to be a strange Christmas – my sister, of course, happily let us stay there but we’d already exchanged our gifts and of course, my kids missed seeing their Dad.

Have you started making plans yet? Got any exciting surprises in mind?