Fitting multiple Christmases into one week? Here's how to keep sane (while trying to please everyone)

Dear Jane, 

My wife and I live in London and have a large, multigenerational family, with three children under five – so we are doing our bit to boost the numbers! The festive season is incredibly complicated to arrange, and seems to become more so every year. People start to put bids in for the various “big days” and there is a certain amount of squabbling over who gets to do the turkey, when and where the children get to open their presents, etc.

My parents are divorced, and my wife’s parents live in Cornwall. My brother and his children, who get on well with our kids, live in Wales, while my wife’s sister and her new baby are in Newcastle.

This Christmas, it looks like we shall have to be “on tour” constantly from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day just to see them all at the right time of year. Family is important, but so is sanity. Quite apart from the travelling itself, this plan poses many challenges. 

How do we please everyone? How do we keep the children occupied? What are we going to eat? When will it all be over…?

- A

Dear A, 

Many years ago, when our children were small, my first husband and I would spend Christmas Day visiting different branches of our families in one day within a five-mile radius. Two of them were my divorced father and mother who would never have contemplated spending Christmas together under one roof. The third was my lovely mother-in-law. 

We wanted to see all of them, but were exhausted by the practicalities of lugging around nappies, high-chairs and fractious babies, let alone presents. It would have been so much easier if we could all have gathered together. But we carried on until my mother died. If only my parents had suggested putting aside acrimony for one day of the year, it would have made December 25 so much easier.

Christmas should be a time of give and take. There are always lots of articles about how to put up with relatives we don’t care for. But supposing we really try to love them – or get to know them better so we learn to at least like them?

Mind you, sometimes you can go too far. One Christmas, my sister and her daughter drove hundreds of miles down to Devon to be with us. She left her mobile on her bed and, unknown to her, my naughty boys sent saucy texts to a man she’d just started seeing. Luckily he saw the funny side. Reader, she married him!

One of the magic things about Christmas and families is that adversity can be turned into triumph. I have a friend called Linda Mitchelmore whose mother-in-law was decidedly unsympathetic about her deafness. “If you can’t watch Christmas television like the rest of us,” she declared, “you might as well read this.” 

She tossed over a women’s magazine which happened to have a short story competition in it. My friend entered and won. It was the beginning of her writing career, which is still flourishing 40 years on. The mother-in-law is long dead but my friend says she is very grateful to her. Now that’s love. The irony is that after her death, Linda found her mother-in-law had kept all her short stories. “So she must have been proud of me after all.”

Many families complain about having to be together at Christmas en masse, but for me, there’s nothing that twinges the heart strings more than not having them. Last year, one of my sons wasn’t able to trek down from London to be with us because he and his girlfriend only had two days off and understandably wanted to chill out together. 

Yes, I know he’s 31 but I wanted my “babies” and their babies to be together with us under one roof. That’s when I realised I was in danger of being one of those clingy mothers. So instead, I went up for a weekend before Christmas and we had a great time, walking round Greenwich and taking the riverboat cruise down the Thames. We’re doing the same this year.

I’m lucky enough to be one of those grannies with grandchildren round the corner. But I’ve got plenty of friends whose grandchildren are miles away. One, whose little brood emigrated to Australia just before Covid, finds Christmas very hard without them. “It shouldn’t be any worse than any other day but it is. So last year, my daughter set up a Zoom cookery session for us all. I ‘helped’ my granddaughters bake a Christmas cake using my mother’s old recipe. We had a lot of fun. I also watched them open their stockings on Zoom. I do feel jealous of friends who are with their grandchildren. But we’re planning a long summer trip to see them instead.” 

As far as keeping everyone occupied goes, here are a few recommendations. Keep the following up your sleeve if things get tough/potentially fraught/downright dull. They can bring out the best in most of us:

• Set up adult family play stations such as face painting for adults. Put the children in charge.
• Organise a puppet show using gloves and squeaky voices and the back of the sofa as a stage.
• Start a sing-song.
• Organise a drawing competition – for adults as well as children.
• Devise a treasure hunt (the treasure can be unwanted Christmas gifts from previous years provided the givers aren’t the recipients).
• Organise a family quiz about relatives past and present.
• Stick the name of someone in the family on everyone’s back and get them to guess who they are by asking three questions.

If you’ve ever been invaded by someone else’s unruly children, you might well find yourself wishing they were in Australia. I found myself feeling quite upset when a friend’s toddler broke a pretty Victorian bowl that I’d foolishly left out in the middle of a table. 

Then I remembered how upset my (childless) stepmother had been years ago when my youngest had swung on a tree in her garden and snapped the main branch. So I gathered up the fragments and brightly told my friend that it didn’t matter. Mind you, I gave my stepmother a garden voucher in lieu of the broken tree. My friend didn’t offer to replace the bowl, but then again our friendship is more important than china… 

My second husband doesn’t have children of his own, so I’ve never found myself in the position of welcoming a partner’s children in on Christmas Day. But a friend of mine, who recently married again in her 60s, had a baptism of fire when her new husband’s children unexpectedly pitched up on Boxing Day complete with babies and dogs. 

“I was a bit taken back as we didn’t have enough food in the fridge, but they went out and got pizzas. We all had a great time. They were on their way to visit their mother and I found myself suggesting that my husband’s ex might like to join us. It worked out so well that we’re doing the same this year.”

What tips do you have for our reader? Tell us in the comments below