It's a difficult situation really.
Not everyone has the space to invite relatives to stay, the budget to feed everyone, or the money to travel to stay with them. Some people want to stay in their own homes for various reasons, they don't want to make their children travel, they have to work through Christmas and can't travel or invite people, and if you have parents and in-laws wanting different things pleasing everybody can be difficult.
I do think that if you can visit at other times and have a generally good relationship through the rest of the year, perhaps Christmas Day isn't the be all and end all.
We only have one DS. At some point in his future, he's going to spend Christmas day elsewhere if only for fairness to his future partner's family. We are going to have to accept that and understand that's how life is sometimes. As long as he's happy.
And sadly not every family member deserves to be with others at Christmas.
We used to travel 250 miles to stay with family over Christmas. Both my parents and PILs lived in the same town, but we stayed with my parents as PILs used to make us sleep on the floor in the living room even though they had two empty bedrooms. They used to make us get up at 6am so MIL could tidy up, and they spent most of their time sighing about the mess our things made in the suitcase. We had to keep the case in the car.
Their garden was also open to the street, and we had our dog with us, so it wasn't safe, practical, or comfortable to stay with them.
PILs took this as a personal insult, and kept note of how long we spent with my parents so we would spend the same with them. It meant that every day we were driving 40 minutes from one side of town to the other, to spend a minimum of four hours with PILs. And then the forty minutes back again when we were allowed to leave. Anything less was seen as us favouring my parents (who run a business which is open right through Christmas, it's their busiest time, so we weren't exactly spending every other moment with them. They were at work.)
I've lost count of the Christmas's and New Years ruined by PIL because they felt they were getting a raw deal on our time.
And nothing was ever good enough for them. They hated their presents, even if we'd bought them exactly what they asked for.
FIL once rang DH to say the presents we gave them were pathetic and insulting, and we were users who were taking them for mugs by giving them such awful gifts. That same year BIL and SIL gave them a very expensive radio and MIL complained that they already had a radio, had nowhere to put this new one, and they wouldn't use it anyway.
That same year, they disowned DH because we'd spent two hours at his sisters house and they thought that if we had time to spare it should have been spent with them first.
They were furious the year I was ill, accused me of faking the norovirus to spite them, and spent days ringing us every half an hour to make sure we were actually at home and not sneakily spending time with my parents and not telling them. I couldn't sleep because the phone was constantly ringing, and FIL accused DH of ruining his mother's life.
They've turned up at my parents house while we were there at Christmas and shouted at DH in the street, accusing him of lying about where we were and what time we said we would visit them. This is because on Sundays my parents make lunch for 4pm, when they finish work. PILs know this, it's been this way since I met DH and we'd been married a couple of years by then, but they insisted we should have been there at 1pm because lunchtime is 12 noon.
They were ringing DH almost constantly from 12:30pm, demanding to know where we were, then told us not to bother visiting after all as they had made plans to go out at 6pm so us leaving my parents house at 5pm when dinner was finished to drive the forty minutes to their house was a waste of time. Then they turned up at ten past four, knowing the whole family would be sitting down to eat, to cause trouble and shout. They banged on the front door and then went back to the car to wait for DH to go out. FIL actually drove over DH's foot on purpose while he was trying to talk to them, after telling DH he as a liar and not their son.
Every Christmas and New Year, without fail, they have done their best to cause trouble and ruin things for everybody.
The year our daughter died, right before Christmas, they were especially awful to us.
And when we finally reduced our contact with them they chose Christmas as the time to tell DH his sibling was in hospital with a hereditary and potentially fatal disease.
They refused to tell him what that hereditary disease was, so we were left worrying about BIL, worried that DH and his other siblings were also carriers of the disease, and believing that our two babies who died (unexplained stillbirth and neonatal death, both dying in the same year as each other) may have died because of this disease. And our less than two year old DS might also have this hereditary disease and might die as well.
They kept this lie up for two weeks, refusing to tell us what the disease was as "it's a long name we can't say" and we were terrified.
We had DS booked in to the doctor for blood tests to try and find out if anything was wrong with him before SIL slipped up and we overheard her talking on the phone, telling her friend that BIL had accidentally overdosed on amphetamines and alcohol while 'celebrating' with his friends.
That was it for me.
They let us think our children died because of this disease, and worry that DH and DS might also have it.
The cruelty is unimaginable unless you live with it day in and day out for years, as we have done. And Christmas makes them worse for some reason.
Although they did chose the anniversary of my grandmother's death to ring DH and tell him they thought he should divorce me because they had made up a pack of lies about my behaviour. They waited for our stillborn son's first birthday anniversary to tell me they didn't consider him to be their real grandchild. And waited for our wedding anniversary to tell me they'd thrown our daughter's photograph in the bin.
I don't care if they spend every Christmas from now on sitting on their own in the dark, freezing cold, with nothing to eat and nobody to talk to. They can spend every day for the rest of their lives in that state for all I care. They will never set foot in my house or me set foot in theirs, not for Christmas or any other reason.
I realise that might make me sound just as bad as they are. I don't care. They've done too much to deserve any kindness from me.
I'm kind to people who are kind to us. We invite our elderly neighbour to us for coffee and cake, we make sure he has a gift to open on Christmas day, we take him some "leftovers" to make sure he has a hot meal on the days he's not spending elsewhere, if he can't travel to his family for Christmas we invite him to spend the day with us.
He's a kind man. He's good company. He's never asked me if it hurts to give birth to a dead baby (which MIL has done). He's the sort of person who deserves company, not just at Christmas but through the year. I promise I'm not all bad, but PILs aren't fit to be around normal people and they will be alone for a long, long time before they ever have my company again.