AIBU to ask my husband to change Christmas traditions with DSC

[spookymooky1]

My husband has two children from his previous relationship, both boys one aged 8 and one 12. We have been married three years and together for 5, I was not the other woman.
He basically gets his kids 45% of the time. He does all the pick ups and drop offs and their mum lives around 40 minutes drive away.
Christmas (yes I know it's early but in a step family you do start thinking of plans well in advance) he normally picks the DSC up at 1ish on Christmas Day and keeps them until Boxing Day 6ish.
This has never been ideal for me and now we have a 2 1/5 year old toddler I'm wondering if it's time for a change.
him picking up his kids at 1pm means it splits our day right down the middle, we can't go to my families for Christmas lunch and they've often eaten lunch at their mums so won't touch my Christmas tea.
They always had their Christmas Day on Boxing Day morning (Santa came to dads on Christmas night) I don't think the boys believe in Santa anymore.
AIBU to ask every second year we do Christmas the three of us and collect them on Boxing Day morning? I don't mind things staying the same this year but any suggestions moving forward would be appreciated

And from his point of view, if his children are eating Christmas lunch at 12 o'clock with their mother and the OP and her child are eating Christmas lunch at lunchtime with the OP's family, and nobody wants to eat a big meal in the evening. So her husband doesn't get any Christmas Dinner, unless he wants to cook a big meal himself that no one else wants to eat. I can see why that option isn't very appealing to him.

Boo hoo. 🎻 If you break up one family and decide to have more kids with someone else then you suck up the consequences. He's the problem here by the sounds of it, not the DSC. He needs to behave like an adult and minimise the consequences of his choices on everyone else.

Even without blended families, when people get married they often have to negotiate holiday visits with their respective sides of the family. Sometimes that means extended families adjusting times or even days to make everything work. You find a balance and then someone else gets married and then the reshuffling has to happen again.

your parents needing to have the main meal a couple of hours later is trivial unless it creates a domino effect and causes other people to not be able to attend.

Do Christmas your way and expect the SC to muck in.
Or maybe they (actually, the mum) should be willing to compromise and you also compromise and make a new set of family traditions.

The current arrangement sounds absolutely awful for everyone involved.

But you an adult, you can do what you want. TBH I wouldn't stay with a man who ditated anything to me.

But still unsettling for everyone as the day is split in 2.

I'd much rather alternate, personally but agree if suggesting that then focusing it as having the step kids all day every other year not 'just us 3' every other year. Same arrangement, different message.

I think it would be better to swap each year.

Year 1 -
christmas day and new years day at mum's. Boxing day and new year's eve at dad's.

Year 2 - boxing day and new years eve at mum's. Christmas day and new year's day at dad's.

Surely that fairer and way less stress collecting 🤷‍♀️

It's fine for the OP's children to always have rubbish Christmases to fit in with their half siblings because they'll never know any different?

Jeez.

@spookymooky1 can I ask why your so stuck on their mum dropping off/picking up? I'm not sure how it effects you if you aren't the one having to do it ? Also I think you trying to change plans isn't fair very on his children he already had before meeting you. Surely you knew before becoming serious with him that his children would always come first in his life and if the plans in place suit them just now I very much doubt he will change them.

Right so when the OP's children get older, when do they get to have Christmas lunch with their dad, if he's always absent for upwards of an hour and a half at lunchtime every single Christmas Day?

If affects her because her husband disappears for a large chunk of every Christmas Day.

This is a straw man things will change as the DC get older but it will be at their request as teenagers not at the whim of their step mother. Most teenagers I know would happily eat an Xmas lunch @ 12 and another at 3 or 4pm. This is a non problem.

It may be for the second class child who knows everything revolves around what their half siblings want.

But the children of the second marriage get all day every Xmas with both their parents, so yes they can have lunch at 3pm.

Me and ds’s dad used to split our Christmas Day. He always stayed with me Christmas Eve, as I was the big kid at Christmas, then dad would pick him up at lunchtime and he would have lunch and presents at dads.

Then ex met a women, who was amazing at first. She was brilliant with ds, painted his bedroom as she was an amazing artist, picked him up from school, took him out etc. She was lovely! Then she had her own children.

She refused to go on holidays as a family if ds was there, would not look after him, and wanted Christmas to be changed so ds spent it with me and her dc had their dad to themselves.

Unfortunately fortunately they got divorced….

I'm not talking about the stepchildren, I'm talking about the OP's children. If the OP's young children are having rubbish Christmases because of this bonkers arrangement, that's not going to change at the request of teenage stepsiblings, is it?

The problem here is obvious. Lunchtime is a completely antisocial time to do the handover. If they insist on splitting Christmas Day, either the OP's husband needs to pick his kids up slightly earlier so they come over for lunch (and don't eat Christmas lunch beforehand) or he needs to pick them up later in the afternoon so the OP and her husband and children can have their Christmas lunch first.

And her husband's ex wife should be doing her fair share of the driving.

It's utterly shit for the OP and her children to be abandoned over lunchtime every year (on strict instructions not to go to the OP's family for lunch either) and for the OP to then spend her afternoon slaving away making an evening meal that her stepchildren don't want to eat because they had their big meal at lunchtime. That would be shit any particular year but making them all do that every year until the stepchildren have grown up is ludicrous.

The stepchildren might not have chosen for their parents to separate. The OP and her husband might have chosen to form a relationship knowing that he had children from his first marriage. But that doesn't mean that this arrangement needs to be preserved for all eternity just because his children from his first marriage are innocent in all this. Other people are innocent in all this too, namely the OP's children and her parents.

As for all the people criticising the OP's parents for not eating their Christmas lunch in the middle of the afternoon so the OP's stepchildren can attend, what on earth makes anyone think her stepchildren want to attend?

Imagine you are one of the OP's stepchildren and your Christmas Day looks like this. You wake up in your mum's house, open your presents while your mum is cooking, gobble down your Christmas lunch at 12 o'clock when you're probably not even that hungry but you have to be ready to get picked up by your dad at 1 o'clock, then instead of being able to relax around the table or get back to your presents, you have to get in the car and drive to your stepmum's parents' house, i.e. two old people who aren't even your own grandparents, where you're expected to sit politely at the table for a second Christmas lunch about two hours after your first one, which obviously you're too full to touch. And you don't really get to spend any quality time with your dad or look at your presents until much later. How on earth is that a good Christmas Day for the stepchildren?

It makes so much more sense for them to stay with their mum for a few more hours. I expect she would prefer that too.

So who is the current arrangement actually benefiting?

No one.

No they don't, they get abandoned every single year over lunchtime.

For whose benefit? Their stepsiblings who have already eaten lunch at 12pm?

Do you have a second car/means to get to your parents house, OP? The more I think about it the more of a no brainer it seems that if the arrangement isn't going to change, you should go to your parents house for lunch and the afternoon while he does this, and come back together for the evening. It's incredibly selfish of him to object to this.

Great summary.
The current King Solomon set up is making Christmas Day a bit shit for everyone and OP is getting pelters for wanting everyone to enjoy a proper Christmas Day and all it involves.
There's nowt queer as folk, as they say.

So who is the current arrangement actually benefiting?

No one.

@MargotBamborough excellent point. These arrangements take place simply because “that’s what we’ve always done” with no thought to whether they serve any benefit. This is all too common in step families

I haven't rtft but we have a similar arrangement to you - separated 6 years this xmas and I have always had Xmas eve/Xmas day with the dc until about 4/5pm when their dad picks them up, takes them to his and they do Xmas eve/Day all over again at his. He had an affair and broke the marriage/family up so he felt it was right I still got to spend this time with them (he was right). It has worked well for us all but now ex has met someone who doesn't live that close to us, so has changed arrangements this year to picking them up Boxing Day morning and having them for a day or two.

The dc are 16 and 18 now so it's fine but I wouldn't have been thrilled with him changing the arrangements like this when they were younger just because he met someone else and it was inconvenient/he couldn't have a drink.

It's tough to please everyone but you have to work together really to find a solution that everyone is happy enough with (you, your dh, his other dc and their mum).

You can only discuss. I like the idea of the Mum dropping the kids off later on Christmas afternoon, in preparation for the kids to spend a quality Boxing Day with you.

Why is it rubbish for the child/children of the 2nd relationship? Just because it isn't what you like it doesn't mean they will feel the same. I have 4 kids, 2 from first marriage and 2 from 2nd.

My older two had Christmas Eve/Christmas morning with their dad and his family, lots of fun with grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, then came to us sometimes having lunch with their dad sometimes coming to us in time for lunch. They loved having two Christmas Days in one day, one in each house.

In my house my younger kids had Christmas morning, opened what Father Christmas had brought them, grandparents would arrive. Lots of fun and then big siblings arrived and more presents, bigger kids to play with them, bigger kids loving the excuse to be like little kids again (obviously just to amuse the little ones but they did a very convincing job of enjoying it unless of course it actually is fun.)

I would never have agreed to miss seeing them on Christmas Day and fortunately my husband would never even have suggested it.

All the fuss about having to do Christmas tea alone for 6 pm as partner is absent for less than 2 hrs and is presumably back by 2 pm is just silly and just sounds like desperately trying to justify what she wants.

I think that is a terrible arrangement for both families and the kids. A judge tried to impose that on us and both exH and I refused as we had already seen that it didn’t allow for anyone to have a nice uninterrupted Christmas Day or see the extended family.

You may ask, they may say no, but who knows, probably they would be more than happy to change it, some options could be:

1. Christmas Day with mum, Boxing Day with dad one year, Christmas Day with dad, Boxing Day with mum the next

2. What we did, as we needed to travel to see our respective families was that the first week of the holiday was spent with one parent, the second with the other and we rotated each year so both of us could have the kids on Christmas Day on alternate years

3. My boyfriend’s exW would not, ever allow the children to see their dad on Christmas Day as Christmas is big for her and she doesn’t give a shit about her exH, but we have learned that is not worth it to make a big fuss about it, they have their big party with mum at Christmas, we have the big party on New Year’s Eve (mind you, no toddlers involved here, it might be different with toddlers)