My husband and I are housed through my partners job on a large estate. My SIL and husband are also housed on the same estate as my husband and SILH work together.
So, H and I have hosted and done all the cooking for my SIL, SILH and FIL for the past two years and paid for the bulk of it too. It's a lot of hard work. Whenever my FIL comes over he brings his little dog over and it attacks my cats and goes to the toilet on the floor, runs all over the furniture and FIL doesn't do so much as lift a finger to control it or clean up after it (or even apologise for the trouble!) so this year we've said he cant bring it. He's refusing to put it in a kennel, or leave it at my SIL house which is 2 minutes drive so SILH/H can easily check on the it while they're out on shift. FIL said he'll leave dog in his van on our driveway all day and then sleep with it in the van overnight, 'so he can drink alcohol' which I think is ridiculous. We have our own boxing day plans and dont really want him blocking us in with is van and coming in and out in the morning for the kitchen and bathroom especially as he's supposed to be staying with SIL. And its not exactly great for a dog to be stuck in a van all day with no light.
We have our own dogs who we've put a lot of effort in to training them to behave and have always respected other people when they have a no dog policy - they're our responsibility so why should anyone else have to put up with them if they don't want to? So we expect the same from FIL. We happily welcome other peoples dogs in to our house on the condition that they behave which 99% of the time they do. I just don't want to be cleaning dog piss off my carpets whilst trying to make christmas happen. SIL is basically fighting FIL's corner to bring the dog and making us feel like we're being difficult.
The obvious answer to the dog problem would be for SIL to host Christmas, which we have politely suggested and said we would still cook. It turns out SIL and SILH 'have to' have Christmas at ours because SILH is rota-ed to work on Christmas day but doesn't want to so we need to have it at ours because if we have it at their house, which is closer to other people who live on the estate, everyone will know he's ducking off his shift and he'll get in to (more) trouble with management. The problem is H is a supervisor and SILH is not, so they have put us in a really awkward position where if we get caught my hub will go down too for knowing he's bunking off. We don't think H should have to take risks with his job because of them, we could lose our house and everything. And worse, they weren't even up front with us about why they insisted we host (again) until we said we'd had enough of the dog. I feel a bit like they've tried to trick us in to being their scapegoats.
I feel like the lot of them are completely out of order and they're making us feel like we're being the difficult ones. H and I want to just say we're having Christmas on our own because it's getting too ridiculous but before we could say anything they messaged to say they had bought Christmas dinner (which will probably be out of date by the 25th?!) so I feel they've done this to blackmail us a bit. Are we being unreasonable at this point to say we've had enough and wont be hosting?