If you plan to spend Christmas with your extended family, this tend to get complicated. Now there are contributing factors here, maybe only one side of your family really gets together or maybe all of your family is out of town. Whatever the dynamics are I strongly suggest you talk ahead of time and make a plan so that when the holidays come around your ready to go and your family knows what to expect.
In my family most of my husbands extended family live within 45 min from us, but my family all live about 3 1/2 hours away. Before we even got married the holiday season was discussed and for us since our familys were so far apart it worked out pretty well one year its Thanksgiving with his famiy and Christmas with mine and the next year we flip.
Now if you have family all in town, or maybe you only celebrate with your family, this obviously changes things. Personaly I think it would be harder and beocome overwhelmed if your entire family was in town. I would want to see them all on Christmas day and that just might not be possiable. Maybe you can, maybe you can do one family in the morning and another in the evening.
Whatever you do just make sure it works for you and that your in agreement.
Holidays and family are always an interesting mix. Both our parents live in LA (or my parents did until 2 years ago) and since neither family really celebrated on the day of Christmas or Thanksgiving, it was easier to do family gatherings since we just got together on one weekend.
These days, however, we can only make one trip home a year and we try to make it so that we’re home for Christmas at least. And all I can say is that it’s a nightmare trying to organize when we’ll see family. At least we stay with Jason’s parents when we’re home so we’ll always get to spend time with them.
My parents, on the other hand, have this really bad habit of planning events and not notifying us about it until the day before and then expect us to show up. They figure that since they are also coming into town (from Iowa) that we should be ready to attend anything they plan without checking with us first and that has caused a lot of unnecessary arguments within the family, especially since they also fail to let my siblings know about the plans too. So, yes, my family gives me a headache when it comes to the holidays.