Christmas visit stress

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skigirl1689

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Full disclosure, this is probably just going to be a venting post. :o

It seems every time we go visit family for Christmas (1,000+ mile round-trip) we always seem to have issues finding relatives to stay with. It’s just crazy stressful and would be extremely expensive to stay in a hotel, even if we got a good deal. Alas, same issues arising this year again.

I just almost want to just stay home and forgo the stress and horrible moods that come with it. Don’t get me wrong, I love visiting family, but it is so stressful :(. If we didn’t travel, no one would ever come see us so that is not an option either.
 
Have you invited them to stay with you? If not they may feel a little put upon or that you are trying to freeload off of them. You don’t say how many of you there are if you have young kids or a lot of people in your family that’s asking a lot of family to feed and house you if you have a big family. If you really feel the need to see them can you stay at a budget hotel. Somewhere clean up cheap no frills especially if you’re just going to be there to sleep. When I travel I’ve shared a room with as many as four others and bring an inflatable mattress and sleeping bag. How is if you can travel 1000 miles plus you can’t do a hotel. Just looking for more info. I’m not saying you feel entitled to free room and board but your post kind of sounds like it. I stayed with family once while visiting my brother. It was not my idea my mom insisted I stay with my uncle on my visit as my brother lived with 5 guys. My uncle was great but his wife was horrible to me and kept making side comments. I ignored them and kept as much out of the way as possible. She even said I was the cleanist guest she had ever had. But she still made it well known she felt imposed on which I felt was very rude especially since it wasn’t even my idea and I was mostly out of their way visiting with my brother around town. I would never stay with family again after that except my brother or sister or dad.
 
Luvz2travel said:
Have you invited them to stay with you? If not they may feel a little put upon or that you are trying to freeload off of them. You don’t say how many of you there are if you have young kids or a lot of people in your family that’s asking a lot of family to feed and house you if you have a big family. If you really feel the need to see them can you stay at a budget hotel. Somewhere clean up cheap no frills especially if you’re just going to be there to sleep. When I travel I’ve shared a room with as many as four others and bring an inflatable mattress and sleeping bag. How is if you can travel 1000 miles plus you can’t do a hotel. Just looking for more info. I’m not saying you feel entitled to free room and board but your post kind of sounds like it. I stayed with family once while visiting my brother. It was not my idea my mom insisted I stay with my uncle on my visit as my brother lived with 5 guys. My uncle was great but his wife was horrible to me and kept making side comments. I ignored them and kept as much out of the way as possible. She even said I was the cleanist guest she had ever had. But she still made it well known she felt imposed on which I felt was very rude especially since it wasn’t even my idea and I was mostly out of their way visiting with my brother around town. I would never stay with family again after that except my brother or sister or dad.
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We live in a very remote region of the state, and everyone else generally lives in the same area, both sides of the family as well, so most of my relatives have only been up here for one wedding, in the 25 years my family has lived up here. I’m sure if someone ever visited they’d be welcome to stay w/ us. We usually stay a week, and visit many relatives as well as pay for food and other incidentals if our relatives let us (usually we have to leave it and not give it to them directly if they won’t take it). Who we usually stay with are always offering us to stay but other relatives are this year. It’s just how our family is. No little kids either.

I guess it’s hard to understand the situation from the outside.
 
skigirl1689 said:
We live in a very remote region of the state, and everyone else generally lives in the same area, both sides of the family as well, so most of my relatives have only been up here for one wedding, in the 25 years my family has lived up here. I’m sure if someone ever visited they’d be welcome to stay w/ us. We usually stay a week, and visit many relatives as well as pay for food and other incidentals if our relatives let us (usually we have to leave it and not give it to them directly if they won’t take it). Who we usually stay with are always offering us to stay but other relatives are this year. It’s just how our family is. No little kids either.

I guess it’s hard to understand the situation from the outside.
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A week can be a long time to have visitors if you aren’t used them them. Just saying. If it were me I wouldn’t worry about visiting them this year. Take a year off and explain it’s because of the distance. Have you verbally offered them a place to stay? You can’t always assume people know what you’re thinking. Not judging here just trying to answer your initial question.
 
We used to visit my parents for two weeks at a time. They lived almost 1000 miles from our place and it took me two days of driving to get there. (If my husband came, we could knock it out in one day.)

They loved to have us and would, once a year, travel two days to see us. They would also stay a couple of weeks.

Everyone had a wonderful time. And my parents didn’t mind having their home as home base for us. In other words, we would visit other family and friends during the day and come back to their house to sleep.

My in laws on the other hand, didn’t understand why we didn’t stay with them for a night or two. Or why we haven’t been back to town since my parents moved.

But my in laws won’t make the room for us. They have a 3 bedroom house, with a full, finished basement. But there is no room at the inn. :rolleyes: They have said they “might” be able to put us up for a night or two.

So that means we would travel for two days, spend a night or two, then do what? Get a hotel? Spend two more days traveling home?

I don’t think so. If they want us to visit, there have to be some accommodations made. I’m not going to travel almost 1000 miles to stay in a hotel so we can visit for a few hours, then travel back. 🤷

I don’t see why you should have to do it either.
 
Luvz2travel said:
A week can be a long time to have visitors if you aren’t used them them. Just saying. If it were me I wouldn’t worry about visiting them this year. Take a year off and explain it’s because of the distance. Have you verbally offered them a place to stay? You can’t always assume people know what you’re thinking. Not judging here just trying to answer your initial question.
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Yes, we have invited them to stay…they just see no reason to visit as we’re the only ones in the area. It just has always been this way. Heard lots of complaining when they came up here the one time.

Sigh…looking for hotel deals so we’ll see.
 
The other possibility is to see them at a different time of year. Many people feel funny having any guests in their homes at Christmas. They get more insular. They also invariably have relatives on both the husband and the wife’s side to visit with. It can get so nutty!! The same people can be far more expansive when it is the prime weather season for their area, whether that is May or July or whenever. It is far easier to entertain when you can just grill something, don’t you think? Summer entertaining is much more relaxed than Big Holiday entertaining. Travelling is also safer during last spring and summer, with more hours of daylight. (I would avoid the weeks immediately before school starts, if families have children. If no one does, the weekends after school starts can actually be the best.)

Consider switching your annual visit to a different time of year, timed to be the most enjoyable time to visit their area. Thanksgiving might even work. You don’t know how it will work until you try it.

It is also easier to say not “We’re not coming to see you this year” but “We’re going to come and visit you when it is more relaxed for everyone and we have a better chance to enjoy the area.” It is not a rejection of them, but just a way to look for a better time for everyone. Just don’t choose another “family” holiday, like Mother’s Day, when the families will again have demands from both sides of their families.

What about seeing them on Christmas?? There is the phone…our family does it every year! (And there’s Skype, too, if you need visuals!)
 
maryjk said:
We used to visit my parents for two weeks at a time. They lived almost 1000 miles from our place and it took me two days of driving to get there. (If my husband came, we could knock it out in one day.)

They loved to have us and would, once a year, travel two days to see us. They would also stay a couple of weeks.

Everyone had a wonderful time. And my parents didn’t mind having their home as home base for us. In other words, we would visit other family and friends during the day and come back to their house to sleep.

My in laws on the other hand, didn’t understand why we didn’t stay with them for a night or two. Or why we haven’t been back to town since my parents moved.

But my in laws won’t make the room for us. They have a 3 bedroom house, with a full, finished basement. But there is no room at the inn. :rolleyes: They have said they “might” be able to put us up for a night or two.

So that means we would travel for two days, spend a night or two, then do what? Get a hotel? Spend two more days traveling home?

I don’t think so. If they want us to visit, there have to be some accommodations made. I’m not going to travel almost 1000 miles to stay in a hotel so we can visit for a few hours, then travel back. 🤷

I don’t see why you should have to do it either.
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This is exactly our situation. When my grandparents were alive, we divided our time between their two houses and it was the only opportunity my sisters and I got to get to know them.
EasterJoy said:
The other possibility is to see them at a different time of year. Many people feel funny having any guests in their homes at Christmas. They get more insular. They also invariably have relatives on both the husband and the wife’s side to visit with. It can get so nutty!! The same people can be far more expansive when it is the prime weather season for their area, whether that is May or July or whenever. It is far easier to entertain when you can just grill something, don’t you think? Summer entertaining is much more relaxed than Big Holiday entertaining. Travelling is also safer during last spring and summer, with more hours of daylight. (I would avoid the weeks immediately before school starts, if families have children. If no one does, the weekends after school starts can actually be the best.)

Consider switching your annual visit to a different time of year, timed to be the most enjoyable time to visit their area. Thanksgiving might even work. You don’t know how it will work until you try it.

It is also easier to say not “We’re not coming to see you this year” but “We’re going to come and visit you when it is more relaxed for everyone and we have a better chance to enjoy the area.” It is not a rejection of them, but just a way to look for a better time for everyone. Just don’t choose another “family” holiday, like Mother’s Day, when the families will again have demands from both sides of their families.

What about seeing them on Christmas?? There is the phone…our family does it every year! (And there’s Skype, too, if you need visuals!)
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Good idea…but it is the one time one side of the family gets together. Who knows, we might get stranded by a blizzard 🤷.
 
skigirl1689 said:
Good idea…but it is the one time one side of the family gets together. Who knows, we might get stranded by a blizzard 🤷.
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Float the idea. You may not be the only one who’d rather see each other in warm weather, in shorts and with beers and burgers.
 
I love my family, but I generally don’t like having overnight guests. It’s very stressful, especially during the holidays. Trying to get gifts together and plan a big meal is hard enough, especially when you don’t have a lot of time off from work. Add a bunch of people staying over, and then you have more work to prepare in addition to the disruption of your routine.

Similarly, I do not enjoy staying at others’ houses when we visit people. I’d much rather stay in a hotel, both because I like to have a place to retreat to and also because I don’t want to make more work for anyone else. Some people are just private. Your relatives aren’t doing anything wrong by not inviting you to stay with them, especially if it’s for an entire week.
 
Lorelei12 said:
I love my family, but I generally don’t like having overnight guests. It’s very stressful, especially during the holidays. Trying to get gifts together and plan a big meal is hard enough, especially when you don’t have a lot of time off from work. Add a bunch of people staying over, and then you have more work to prepare in addition to the disruption of your routine.

Similarly, I do not enjoy staying at others’ houses when we visit people. I’d much rather stay in a hotel, both because I like to have a place to retreat to and also because I don’t want to make more work for anyone else. Some people are just private. Your relatives aren’t doing anything wrong by not inviting you to stay with them, especially if it’s for an entire week.
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Unless the OP can’t afford to stay at a hotel. I know we couldn’t.

In that case the OP is justified in saying, “Sorry, you won’t see us for a while. We can’t afford to travel AND to pay for a hotel. And since no one can put us up, we can’t afford to come.”
 
Lorelei12 said:
I love my family, but I generally don’t like having overnight guests. It’s very stressful, especially during the holidays. Trying to get gifts together and plan a big meal is hard enough, especially when you don’t have a lot of time off from work. Add a bunch of people staying over, and then you have more work to prepare in addition to the disruption of your routine.

Similarly, I do not enjoy staying at others’ houses when we visit people. I’d much rather stay in a hotel, both because I like to have a place to retreat to and also because I don’t want to make more work for anyone else. Some people are just private. Your relatives aren’t doing anything wrong by not inviting you to stay with them, especially if it’s for an entire week.
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I totally understand that viewpoint. Maybe you misread the post, it’s just other family are already staying with the one place and the other will be out of town, so it’s not that we’re not welcome, just circumstances aren’t working out as they usually do. I think I said it’s usually a week but recently it’s been 3-4 days and this time, weather permitting it’s 4 days. We’ll see how it works out…we’re always suggesting a summer alternative but no one likes messing with tradition, I guess.
 
skigirl1689 said:

“I guess it’s hard to understand the situation from the outside.”

No, it’s a perfectly normal, average problem when you’ve got a good-sized family and a 1,000+ miles to go in order to see extended family. It’s very normal to have just enough money to get you where you’re going and more or less feed you, but not enough money to drop $500-$1,000 on hotel rooms (and remember, you’ve already been paying for hotels and meals for there and back). I remember, once, when we had just one 2-year-old, deciding to take the load off of our relations and stay in a motel for much of our visit. It was a relatively cheap place, but our tab was $800. We’re probably never going to do that again, unless we strike oil in the back yard.

Some more thoughts:
  1. I like EasterJoy’s summer travel idea. We gave up on winter (i.e. holiday) travel some years ago.
  2. Wait to find somebody who can take you guys, and then make plans to go, rather than planning to go, and then trying to find a place to stay.
  3. One way to do this is to, well in advance (say in the summer), announce that you’d like to come, but you can’t afford a hotel. Then say that you’ll be checking in after Thanksgiving to see what the family decided. Let them figure it out amongst themselves. If they can’t come up with a reasonable arrangement, don’t go.
  4. If that doesn’t work, just announce that you’re skipping the yearly get together until you have the wherewithal to afford a hotel. That might mean coming every third or fourth year, instead of every year. Explain that.
We have very similar issues. It’s 2,000+ miles to my family and a different 2,000+ miles to my husband’s family and there are five of us now. The more there are of us, the bigger of an imposition it is to stay for any length of time, and yet we’d never be able to afford air fare and a hotel for a week–we almost might as well go to Disneyland instead. And since it’s so far away and so expensive to get there, the solution of just staying a night or two doesn’t work either, because if you’re going to go at all and face all the horrors of modern air travel, you’d better stay nearly a week, or what’s the point? So, yeah, I feel your pain.

Our solution is to not all travel anywhere. My husband will take a kid or two to his parents or I will take a kid or two to my family, but we haven’t all travelled anywhere for quite some time.
 
skigirl1689 said:
I totally understand that viewpoint. Maybe you misread the post, it’s just other family are already staying with the one place and the other will be out of town, so it’s not that we’re not welcome, just circumstances aren’t working out as they usually do. I think I said it’s usually a week but recently it’s been 3-4 days and this time, weather permitting it’s 4 days. We’ll see how it works out…we’re always suggesting a summer alternative but no one likes messing with tradition, I guess.
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If someone is out of town, maybe this isn’t a total command performance. You might consider, for instance, saying that you have decided to alternate travelling one year and staying home with your own bed and your own tree the next.

Either way, these suggestions aren’t meant to imply that there is a path better than the present one. Sometimes the way you’ve been doing it is what feels best, even though you wished there were something easier you could like just as well.
 
skigirl1689 said:
Full disclosure, this is probably just going to be a venting post. :o

It seems every time we go visit family for Christmas (1,000+ mile round-trip) we always seem to have issues finding relatives to stay with. It’s just crazy stressful and would be extremely expensive to stay in a hotel, even if we got a good deal. Alas, same issues arising this year again.

I just almost want to just stay home and forgo the stress and horrible moods that come with it. Don’t get me wrong, I love visiting family, but it is so stressful :(. If we didn’t travel, no one would ever come see us so that is not an option either.
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Stay home!!!

Enjoy christmas in the comfort of your own home with no hassle, no stress and no expense…why put yourself through all that stress…
 
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