Holiday over Christmas, to buy presents?

[Horseridermum]

Im taking kids on holiday over Christmas
its a suprise though
my question is would you still buy presents? We will be away until day after boxing day.
obviously il be limited on space in cases for anything big and will have to hide stuff.
kids are 13.5 and almost 10 and don’t believe in Father Christmas anymore

Surely your children have already talked about what gifts they would like for Christmas. A holiday is an adults present.

Do this, although a nice holiday can be a Christmas present especially at their ages, when you get round to telling them say we are going on to.. as a Christmas surprise. And do holiday Christmas day stocking.

If the holiday is a surprise I think you need to buy some gifts.
Unless they've asked for a big holiday instead of gifts.
BTW your dh is a mean twat either way.

we are doing the same but going away from 19th dec to 2nd jan.
i told family and friends only money and what is small enough to fit into a particular gap in my luggage. I have to pack for all of us (the kids have no clue) so it’s even trickier.
My kids have a few stocking filler type things that are small enough to fit into the glove box and I’ve deliberately bought a few small things that can be wrapped when we are there.
We will use Amazon to get some gifts to the children and we are planning on taking things like the Christmas tree and baubles to the local charity shop when we leave.
For everyone else, I am having 2 days off in December to be able to shop and wrap. I’ll drop them round my parents/in laws houses and trust them to distribute them.

I’ve been away for the last 3 christmases and I still take presents. The first time one of the kids still believed in Father Christmas so we took a lot of presents in a suitcase and put our clothes in the ski bag. The second year the suitcase with the presents in went missing on the flight and didn’t arrive until Boxing Day! That was quite stressful. The third time I took much less and put the presents in my hand luggage but some of them were electrical eg air pods and got stopped in security!

I always do a simplified Christmas dinner a few days before we go away and me and husband exchange presents then so we don’t need to take them