Our Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays have always only included grandparents, because we live close to grandparents and nobody else. I’ve celebrated Christmas in St. Louis with my extended family a couple of times, but they are very much the exceptions. We even did Thanksgiving in St. Louis once, but that was only to celebrate my grandmother’s life a month or so after she died.
Mostly Thanksgiving and Christmas are low-key affairs here, which is why this year the holidays feel very post-pandemic: because we’ve been seeing the grandparents indoors without masks since the adults were vaccinated, we basically get to do exactly what we would normally do for the holidays this year. I know this is not a post-pandemic holiday season for many people, but for us it feels like it is.
I have been very much looking forward to celebrating the holidays this year. Last year they caused me a lot of stress, mostly because my parents had different expectations than us and I had difficulty navigating their reactions to our boundary setting. This year I was looking forward to just doing what we normally do! And while we did have to move around the order or some visits because my parents were out of town, we are basically following our pre-pandemic Thanksgiving plans this year.
And today was the first day of that “doing what we usually do” as we spent the day with my in laws. And while it was so nice to be in their house, spending time with them it was… not all that fun. And as I realized how not-all-that-fun it was, a memory began to surface, a memory of feeling rested and relaxed after the holidays last year, in ways I normally wasn’t. It was hard to navigate the disappointment of others, but not actually all that hard spending the time as a family of four, doing exactly what we wanted.
Today it was back to getting the kids out the door at a decent hour, and figuring out when the kids and adults would eat, and helping the kids find ways to pass the time, and navigating the awkward moments when it was clear that our presence there was actually hindering a dynamic that the kids and grandparents are accustomed to enjoying when they are alone together, which is most of the time. Turns out we were all really out of practice, and we encountered some significant bumps in the road.
As we walked in Golden Gate Park, an outing every adult deemed necessary for their own sanity, I recognized that our regular holiday plans are pretty much doomed to fail. Just-come-over-and-spend-the-day is not a plan at all really, and of course it’s going to fail miserably when kids are involved. What exactly do we expect the kids to do all day to pass the time? We even brought their pads and pushed video game time to the middle of the day, but those two hours were over incredibly quickly and then the bickering and the fights and the tantrums began in earnest.
Getting them out of the house was a huge improvement. And when we realized our random “meandering around the park” plan could easily morph into “a trip to the Botanical Gardens” things looked up even more. My in-laws stayed at home, no doubt needing a solid 90 minutes away from us, and I couldn’t blame them. The kids were happy to visit the Botanical gardens and since it’s free to SF residents we didn’t need to spend any amount of time there to feel we’d gotten our money’s worth. We just popped in, walked around for about an hour, and went back.
If it hadn’t been for that 90 minute trip, the day would have been a disaster.
It was about an hour into the visit with my in-laws that I remembered how exhausting and somewhat unpleasant the holidays with the grandparents and our kids actually are. They really are not that fun. We spend most of it managing outrageous behavior as kids struggle to regulate themselves when presents are opened by the truck full and there is absolutely nothing concrete they can do to occupy their time (presents are obviously a Christmas issue, but nothing concrete to occupy their time is a Thanksgiving issue too).
It was a sobering thing to remember, but I’m so glad we had this experience because now we can go into tomorrow (and Christmas) recognizing the pitfalls. My plan originally for tomorrow was to show up at my parents’ house around noon. Now I recognize what a horrible idea that is, because I know they will be busy preparing the meal and my kids will want to do nothing but watch TV. So we’re going to leave the house at noon, but go for a hike somewhere on the way, and show up at around 2:30pm. We usually sit down for Thanksgiving dinner around 4:30 or 5pm and then leave around 7pm. This year my husband is going back without me and the kids, so I know my parents won’t be stressing out about seeing us, and won’t mind that we’re showing up a little later. It’s kind of the perfect plan. In fact I may even have us leave our house later tomorrow.
My kids are definitely going through a phase right now, and it’s not particularly pleasant. Both adapted well to the return to in-person learning (after spending only 10 days in a classroom between March of 2020 and June of 20201). We have been thrilled with their social, emotional and academic progress so far, but in October our son’s mercurial moods returned and we’ve been spending a lot more time managing his emotional outbursts. Our daughter is similarly slipping into bouts of puberty-induced moodiness that are hard to anticipate. Where they were both pretty easy going and happy in September, they are more irritable and reactive now. I really do think we need to have realistic expectations about what they can handle during the holidays this year and plan accordingly.
So yeah, that’s where we’re at. I think I thought at 11-years-old and 8-years-old my kids would be better able to manage the holidays, but they are still the “spirited” kids who needed to see the “big feelings helper” when they were younger because I couldn’t manage their outbursts. Things are a lot easier, but I don’t think my kids will ever be like the “easy” ones I read about in other blogs. And that is fine. I’ll take how much easier it is now, because I was exhausted and overwhelmed when they were younger and now I’m just a little exasperated and annoyed. I can handle exasperated and annoyed any day. And I think I’ll need to face it less if I’m honest with myself when identifying what I actually want out of the holidays and when recognizing what my kids can handle.
So there you have it. A little reality check for everyone who gets to see people this year and thinks it’s going to be THE MOST AMAZING THING EVER! It probably will be amazing, but there are sure to be a lot of bumps in the road.
What are your Thanksgiving plans? Will you be reworking your holiday plans at all (because of the pandemic or otherwise?
