The Holidays....

It is easy to get excited about the Holidays. All of the food, family, friends, drinks, laughs, stories, and memories...it is like happiness crammed into a month. I love the holidays. I love making new memories, keeping traditions, creating traditions, and being among family and friends. The only difficult thing about the holidays...is having a child that you have to share. You want your child to be involved in every holiday tradition. You want them to wake up with you on Christmas and eat with your family on Thanksgiving. As my daughter has gotten older (3 this year) she is becoming more involved and aware about what the holidays mean. She is thrilled that she got to help decorate the tree, that she has an Elf on the Shelf, that we get to go to Christmas parties, that we get to visit with friends that we barely get to see, and that we have an Advent Calendar. I have tried very hard to make the transition days easy. This is all she has ever really known. Her father and I split up when she was a year old. We never lived together so we never really had to make a big change. The biggest change was that she started to stay at his house over night. We do what is best for her and we make the transitions easy. We let her have extra hugs and kisses if she wants them and if she wants to take a special item with her to the other parents house we allow that with no problems or questions asked. As Christmas approaches I am left to wonder if it is fair for her to have to wake up one year here with me and then another year at her dad's. It gets more complicated because here she has a baby brother and as he gets older he isn't going to want to "wait" for his sister to get home to open his presents. I am at a loss as to how I am going to "fix" this issue. Do we open presents on Christmas Eve on the year that she wakes up at her dad's...so that the siblings are able to open them at the same time? I just don't know. When I was growing up we opened one present on Christmas Eve and then we woke up early and rushed down to our stockings. We were able to empty our stockings but we had to wait to open presents. We waited until our parents woke up. I just want a tradition that doesn't have to change every year.