The holidays are a wonderful time of year, my favorite time of year actually. The holidays are meant to be shared with family, and there in lies the challenge. How to fairly juggle sharing the holidays with both sides of the family and not loose your sanity in the process?

My husband and I don’t have kids (yet!), and it is still a challenge for us, I am a little afraid of how bad it will get when we add kids to the mix. The challenge is made a little more difficult by the fact that we live about 800 miles away from our families and only get to see them a couple of times a year. We seem to have worked out a pretty good program by which we spend the first few days with my family and then the last few days with his family. Our arrangement seems to work out pretty well.

The challenge of juggling time fairly between the families becomes all the more challenging when the two sides of the family live far apart from each other. When you don’t have much time off from work over the holidays and the families live far apart what can you do. It isn’t feasible, especially if you have little ones in tow, to jet set to one place only to turn around and hop on a plane to hit the other, all in just a few days.

A lot families face this challenge every year, each family has their own unique approach that works just right for them. Some will split the holidays up, say Thanksgiving with one side of the family and Christmas with the other. Others will just simply say “we are not traveling anywhere, the families have to come to us.” Still others will try to alternate years, this year with one side of the family, next year with the other. Whatever works out best for all involved.

Throw kids into the mix and what seemed like a challenge when you were just a young married couple suddenly becomes even more challenging. Hopefully the way my husband and currently split up our time continues to work when we have children!! Although I am kind of liking the idea of making them come to us

How do you approach this holiday challenge? What do you find works, and what doesn’t?