How we holiday
Holidays can be super sucky for everyone when you’re co-parenting. Cash’s dad gets a lot of the big holidays, since we live 1 million miles away and he’s not around for all the other stuff. I get it, and I’m glad they get to make fun memories, but it’s just not really very fun to do holidays without my mini man. He has a blast, but hates being away from me, so he feels conflicted. Since one of the reasons I started this site was to share openly about single parenting, I thought I’d share how we are surviving (and still love!) this holiday season.
One thing that we’ve done the past two years is nix the Thanksgiving and Christmas travel. We can do one or the other, but not both. This decision is primarily finance-based, if I’m being totally transparent. I’m not sure how they expect someone to travel half way across the country back to back months, during the holidays for a week (or more) at a time, but the two years that I did it when we first moved here were terrible. Cash or I (or both) got super sick both years. I couldn’t afford Christmas presents, a tree, or even the full price of all of the tickets. I was stressed, and frazzled, and we didn’t enjoy the trips nearly as much, because we felt like we had JUST been there. We’d barely unpacked our suitcases before we were heading back.
The past two years, we’ve been switching off Thanksgiving or Christmas, and it has made all the difference in the world. We get really excited about going home to see family, and eating Braums, and experiencing a little cold weather. There’s time to build anticipation and we are able to be healthy and present. It also gives us time to build memories here, which helps Cash’s anxiety about being away from me tremendously.
This year we were together for Thanksgiving, and will be going home for Christmas. We’ll be in Oklahoma for 10 whole days, and I’ll only have Cash for about a half a day (the morning of his birthday, when we do Christmas with my mom). I don’t really like the idea of doing our little family Christmas at someone else’s house, and shipping presents there, and then having to get them back home is impractical, so we do our Christmas here, before we head to Oklahoma.
December 15 will be our Christmas this year. I consult with Santa and let him know that he needs to deliver to our house early. We do the full Christmas Eve/pajamas/cookies for Santa/reading stories the night before, and then we do a full Christmas morning together the next day, with stockings and everything. I also set aside the rest of the day to do nothing but play with all of his new stuff. On “real” Christmas everything is pretty much closed, and you tend to spend the day inside in your pjs, so our Christmas celebration is no exception. Cash chose to set all of our “countdown clocks” to the 15th this year, thoroughly confusing any guests (haha) but it works great for us! I love the fact that he really truly gets two full Christmases, and that we get to experience our own private holiday before the hustle and bustle of the real thing with the rest of our family. It also helps me a little on the day of, knowing that I already got to make those memories with him. I can sit back and really be happy that he is getting to spend time with his dad and their family.