My daughter will be 7 months this Christmas and we are spending her first christmas with my family at our house. In my family we all do stockings and Christmas Eve boxes (me for my partner, my mum for me, my parents for eachother, my cousin etc) and we want to continue this with our daughter. We also love the festivities around Santa e.g going to visit Santa, leaving out a mince pie etc and would like her to have this experience.
My partner is Malawian but based in the UK anf his family do celebrate Christmas religiously but don’t do stockings. The adults do not exchange gifts but the children do receive some. There are no children bar my daughter on my side of the family, but on my partners there is a 4YO, 10YO, 14YO in the immediate family.
Not urgent but we are alternating christmases, so next Christmas will be spent with my partners family and then the following with mine and so on and so forth. How we will inevitably navigate the Santa and stocking issue when at my partners families? I don’t want the other children to feel left out, and I don’t want my daughter to start being confused as to why Santa sometimes comes to her and sometimes doesn’t on Christmas Day. I also don’t want her to start wondering why her cousins don’t receive gifts but she does etc.
We all live in the UK but around a 4hr drive so we’d always be at my families or his families around 3 days in advance of Christmas, otherwise we’d do presents and stockings at ours first.