i been noticing christmas threads lately and i just want to tell people what we do in our family. i deal with a BM who always want to control the holidays. what we like to do because my kids also go to see their father at christmas too is we first always try to schedule the same time but when it don't work out we just do christmas early.
now that kids are older its really easy but even when they were younger we used to tell them santa knows you have two houses to go to this weekend and he made a special arrangement to come to our house early... kids believe anything. we would put out the cookies and everything...
the fun thing was we still were able to tell kids to get to bed early and then we would have christmas morning when we woke up on chritmas eve day then spend day with kids and they would go to other parent christmas eve night....
this way nothing was spoiled, kids had fun and adults had fun and less rushing around and no stress...
i think the BM of DH child was annoyed that we came up with this idea because santa made a special arrangement to come to our house first!!!