Holiday trade-off

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Homemade pumpkin pies, hot spiced apple cider, cozy bonfires, sweatshirts and scarves, and precious moments with family and friends; it doesn't get much better than this people.

I've had my super fat pants out for weeks gearing up for Turkey Day. As I type, my grandmother is preparing a mouth watering stuffing (NOT dressing; dressing is the stuff you put on salads, stuffing is the stuff you stuff in the turkey- I've found myself in many a debate over this common misconception :) ). Stuffing is my jam, speaking of which, the canned cranberry sauce is on standby, ready for action. Last night, I even made a made-from-scratch pumpkin pie (oh yea, be jealous). The angels in Heaven sang the hallelujah chorus as that bad boy came out of the oven...it took everything in me not to shove every morsel of goodness in my face. There is nothing better in this world than Thanksgiving dinner and I don't care if I'm in a weight-loss competition, I'm eating and I'm eating hard today.

Until this year, the biggest problem I ever had to deal with in terms of the holidays were how to stop eating. This year, I have had a taste of a predicament I'll be facing for the rest of my life...

Where do we spend the holidays- with my family or his?

Sure, Jason and I have been dating for almost two years but we've never dealt with this before. Since he lives with his family and I live with mine and we weren't engaged last year, we didn't think twice about the holidays. We said peace out and headed home for the holidays.

But now it's different. Now, we're engaged and soon, we'll have to really figure out what we're going to do!

Because Jason's family is originally from Arizona, most of his family is still there. A couple of days after Christmas, I'll be heading over there to spend some time meeting everyone before I become Mrs. Perry. So in my mind, I was like, "So, you're coming over sometime during Thanksgiving right?".

Wrong.

Jason and I fussed, yelled, screamed, cried (mostly me) and argued. I didn't know what the big hulabaloo was but I didn't think it was too much to ask for him to come over and spend some time with my family after Thanksgiving. I got so upset and defensive; why couldn't he come over?

I went on a search for a solution to my dilemma.

What I found were, in my opinion, mediocre solutions. The most popular solution is to alternate each year who you spend the holidays with. That was the most depressing. I would be absolutely heartbroken if I missed out on a whole year with my family.

The second option was to alternate with the holidays so spend Thanksgiving with one family, Christmas with another. This one is better but gosh, I still feel like I'm missing out.

It was then that I realized that I wasn't going to find a cookie cutter solution that would work for us; I needed to find a solution that tailored to us and our families. We decided that since our families live close to one another (within 2 hours), we would spend 1/2 of the holiday day with one family and the other half with the other. For Thanksgiving, it will probably be us spending the morning/afternoon with Jason's family (watching football, having a big lunch) and then going over to my family to have the next big meal. For Christmas, we would switch. Coming from a Panamanian tradition, we open presents and have a big meal Christmas Eve/Christmas Day at midnight with my family and then spend Christmas Day with Jason's family.

I would love to hear how you and your significant other have navigated through this slippery slope-please share how y'all decided to spend the holidays!

I wish you a wonderful Thanksgiving with your loved ones today!

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