Start Planning Now for The Holidays
An extended family member emailed me in mid-October, asking about our family plans for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I was surprised, since I was still working on Halloween. I hadn’t even thought about later months, much less made plans. At first I groused a bit about the added pressure. Then I realized that she is doing exactly the right thing by planning ahead. Theirs is a complex blended family with three sets of parents and several sets of grandparents, all of whom want and expect to see the children during the holidays. They really do need to start planning now in order to get everyone on the schedule.
Why Early Planning Matters
Advance planning is a key part of lowering stress during the holidays, particularly for families navigating the complexities of foster care, adoption, or blended family dynamics. Holidays often bring up feelings of loss, grief, and anxiety for children separated from biological family members—even when they’re thriving in their current placement.
Whether you are working with the biological family of a foster child, coordinating with an ex-spouse about stepchildren, or managing adoption-related extended family dynamics, you will have to navigate a lot of emotional land mines. Identifying them early will make it more likely that you can find an early solution. Even if you can’t avoid the land mines completely, you can prepare yourself and your child for the fallout. This preparation might include therapeutic conversations, establishing clear expectations with children, or simply giving yourself the emotional bandwidth to respond calmly when complications arise.
For foster and adoptive families especially, holiday planning involves additional layers of complexity. You may be coordinating supervised visits, honoring cultural traditions from a child’s background that differ from your own, or supporting a child through their first holiday season away from their birth family. These situations require not just logistical planning, but emotional and psychological preparation for everyone involved.
Planning Is an Ongoing Process
One point to remember is that planning is a process. You don’t need to have an actual plan right now. You simply need to start the discussion. Once I focused on my relative’s question, for example, I was able to narrow down our Thanksgiving celebration to the weekend after the holiday itself. I still needed to canvass the rest of the extended family about the exact day, but I had a narrow enough range for everyone to plan around.
Starting the conversation early allows everyone to voice their expectations, concerns, and non-negotiables. For foster parents, this might mean opening a dialogue with caseworkers and biological parents about what visits will look like. For blended families, it means getting stepparents and co-parents on the same page before children are caught in the middle of scheduling conflicts. This process-oriented approach removes the pressure of immediate solutions while creating space for collaborative problem-solving.
Setting Boundaries Is Essential
Don’t hesitate to set boundaries in your planning. There are only so many hours on Christmas Day. If you let every set of parents or grandparents have a piece of that particular day, you will have a very hectic schedule. Both you and your kids will be exhausted. More importantly, children—particularly those who have experienced instability or trauma—need predictability and calm during what can already be an emotionally overwhelming season.
Insist on a schedule that works for your family. This isn’t selfishness; it’s protective parenting. Children need downtime, particularly when they’re managing complex emotions about being in multiple family systems. Trauma-informed care principles teach us that overstimulation and constant transitions can be dysregulating for children who have experienced disruption. Setting boundaries around your schedule is an important way to provide the emotional safety and consistency that helps children thrive.
These boundaries might look like limiting celebrations to two locations per day, building in quiet time between visits, or establishing a non-negotiable bedtime even during holidays. They might also mean saying “no” to certain invitations or expectations that simply don’t work for your family’s needs.
Celebrate the Occasion, Not the Day
That being said, don’t forget to be flexible. Celebrate the holiday, not the specific day. My husband, for example, always solved the Christmas Day conundrum by celebrating with his children and extended family on Christmas Eve. That left all day on Christmas for his children to spend with their mother, without any pressure to be with their dad. When we married, my husband and I kept that same tradition. In the process, we discovered the side benefit of having the entire day to ourselves.
This flexibility can be particularly liberating for complex families. Thanksgiving doesn’t have to happen on Thursday. Christmas can be celebrated on December 23rd or 26th. Hanukkah celebrations can be spread across different nights with different family groups. What matters most is the quality of the celebration and the emotional presence of the adults—not adherence to the calendar date.
For foster families, this flexibility might mean celebrating a child’s cultural or religious traditions on a different day to accommodate visits with biological family. For adoptive families, it might mean creating hybrid celebrations that honor both the child’s heritage and their current family’s traditions. This adaptive approach teaches children that family connection transcends specific dates and that love is flexible enough to accommodate everyone’s needs.
Develop Your Unique Family Identity
Which thought leads me to the last principle—plan a unique celebration for your nuclear family. Whether you are parenting stepchildren, foster children, or adopted children, you are forming a unique family team. You need to do all you can to build relationships within that team. Part of that building process is resisting the forces that tend to divide the kids into “ours” and “theirs.”
Complex blended families and foster families usually see different sets of children visiting with different sets of biological relatives at different times. You need to accommodate each child’s desire to visit with his or her own biological family. But in the rush of scheduling for everyone, build in some time for your family to celebrate together with no outside distractions.
This family time can be something simple, like a family dinner-and-a-movie. It can be more elaborate, such as my friends who always plan a trip between Christmas and New Year’s Day. It can be service-oriented, such as helping with a food or toy drive or volunteering at a community center. The details of the project are not as important as there being a project. Time and the opportunity to work together are essential to the relationships that you want to build in your family.
Research on attachment and family bonding emphasizes the importance of shared positive experiences in building secure relationships. Children who participate in regular family rituals and traditions show greater emotional security and family cohesion, regardless of family structure. For children who may struggle with attachment or loyalty conflicts between multiple family systems, these shared traditions become anchors—safe, predictable moments that define “us” as a family unit. They don’t erase other important relationships, but they establish your household as a place of belonging and connection.
Moving Forward
So start planning now for the holidays. Give yourself enough time to navigate the land mines and figure out a schedule that works for your family. Begin those conversations with caseworkers, co-parents, and extended family members. Identify potential conflicts early so you can address them proactively rather than reactively.
Above all, while accommodating everyone else, remember to find time to build your family’s relationships. The holidays offer a unique opportunity to create meaningful memories and strengthen bonds. Don’t let that opportunity be lost in the chaos of meeting everyone else’s expectations. Your children need you to be present, regulated, and intentional—not exhausted, resentful, and stretched too thin.
The goal isn’t perfect holidays. The goal is connection, care, and the gradual building of family identity that will support your children for years to come.
