Should I Not Go to My Parents for Christmas This Year?
It’s a Tuesday morning in early December, and I’m sitting on the living room floor with my four-year-old, trying to untangle a string of fairy lights, when my phone buzzes. A message from my mom: “Are you coming on the 24th or the 25th? Dad wants to know what day we should do the roast.”
I stare at the screen. I’ve known this question was coming for weeks. I still don’t know how to answer it.
Last year’s Christmas is the reason. Not one big explosion, nothing you’d make a movie about. Just a week of small tensions that piled up—my mom telling me to put a jacket on my daughter because she thought she looked cold, my dad sighing when I cut the vegetables the way my kids actually eat them, the same jokes about how I’m tired “all the time” even though I have a job and two children. On the drive home, I sat in the passenger seat and said to my husband, “I can’t do another Christmas like that.” He didn’t ask what “that” meant. He knew.
But here’s the tricky part: my parents are not monsters. They love my kids. They would do anything for them—and they have. It’s not that the house is hostile. It’s that the constant friction wears me down, and my kids feel that wear in the way I speak, in the way I go quiet, in the way I rush them through goodbyes.
I’m not trying to decide if I love my parents. I’m trying to decide what a holiday with them can actually look like.
I asked a friend what she does about her own family around the holidays. She told me they gave up Christmas at home years ago—she celebrates in late January on a different day, and she and her husband take turns each year. I sat in the car outside school with that conversation in my head. Down the street, an older couple was putting up a porch light. And I thought about all the Christmases I’d call “normal” when I was growing up—the ones where my mom disappeared into the kitchen, my dad watched football, and I sat on the floor with my cousins pretending everything was fine.
I don’t want that for my daughter. I don’t want her to learn that holidays are something you white-knuckle your way through for the sake of other people’s feelings. That seems like a bigger lesson than any particular day—it’s about whether you’re allowed to make choices that feel right for your own family unit.
That’s the real question. Not “Should I go?” but “What am I showing her when I go?” Kids watch everything. My daughter has started to notice the little shifts in my voice when my mom calls. Last week she looked up at me after a phone call and said, “Gramma sounds happy today.” I smiled, but I didn’t love that she was scanning for mood cues at four years old. It’s not my mom’s fault, exactly. It’s just that children are sensitive to tension—they feel it before they understand it.
So I’ve been trying to think about this year differently.
My husband and I talked about it last Saturday night, after the kids were in bed. I said, “What if we don’t stay at their house this time?” The idea felt enormous, like telling my parents I was planning to join a cult. But the more we talked, the more the edges softened. What if we stay in a hotel nearby? What if we drive up on the 25th instead of the 23rd? What if we tell them we have to leave by seven because the kids need their routine—which they do, and so do we? At one point I said, “What if I just tell her the truth? That we’re tired and we want things to feel easier this year?” He looked at me like I’d suggested ordering a meal in a language the restaurant didn’t have.
But that’s the thing about decisions like this. The more you make them, the less scary they are. When I was a kid, Christmas felt like a given, carved into stone. As a parent, I can see it’s just one day. I can shape what it looks like, and my parents will have to live with that choice the same way they’ve lived with every choice I’ve made as an adult.
The practical part is harder than the emotional part. There’s the logistics—the timing, the drive, the food. But there’s also the guilt. The feeling that you’re somehow “withholding your kids” or that you’ll miss out on a moment that can’t be repeated—a photo of the kids by the tree, your mom holding up her famous roast.
So I’ve made small rules for myself.
One: I’m not going to have the big conversation with my mom on the phone. When I explain too much, I get defensive and she gets hurt. Over-explaining doesn’t help. So I’ve rehearsed a short response: “We’ll come for lunch on the 25th, but we’re staying in town this time.” If she asks why, I can say it plainly. “It just felt better for us this year.” That’s allowed. That’s enough.
Two: I’m putting a limit on the visit. Two days, not a week. That means my daughter will miss her cousins’ tree-lighting and I won’t see my old school friends. It also means I won’t be watching the clock after day three, feeling like I’m quietly burning alive.
Three: I’m arranging a way out. Even from the hotel, I need an off-switch. My husband and I picked a signal—one hand squeeze, or a look—that means “the kids and I are going for a walk; you cover the conversation.”
These sound small, but they’re the difference between me walking in anxious and me walking in with a plan. I think that’s the deeper issue for a lot of us. We go home and we revert to being twelve, or twenty, or whatever age the house remembers. We don’t act like adults with choices. We act like guests who don’t want to be difficult.
I haven’t answered my mom yet. I’ve typed the message about three times and deleted it twice. But this morning, my daughter brought me a drawing. It was a messy crayon scene—a tree, some squiggles, and two stick figures that she said were me and her, holding hands. “This is us,” she said, “coming down the hill.”
She didn’t mean anything by it. It was just a drawing.
But I looked at it and realised that whatever I decide, this choice is part of her childhood. She’ll remember whether Christmas feels like a thing we survive or a thing we shape. The same way I still remember the muffled arguments in my parents’ car after midnight mass, even though my mother says that was a peaceful Christmas.
So I’m going to send the text. I’m going to tell her we’ll be there for lunch on the 25th, and that we’re staying at the little bed-and-breakfast where we stopped for coffee last summer. She’ll be hurt at first. She might say something about distance. But showing up kindly and explaining gently is better than sacrificing a week to silent tension.
And if lunch is tense—if my dad sighs and my mom pushes my daughter to eat more pie—I’ll drive home a little earlier. I’ll remember that I tried to make it work, and next year I might decide it’s not worth it at all. At least it will be a decision I made, not a tradition I survived.
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