Me (32m) and my wife (31f) had our first child a couple weeks ago, a baby girl (we are thrilled). I know that Christmas is quite a ways off, but as I figured there would be some discussion about our plans, I brought up a few days ago that I would like our family to travel to mine for Xmas 2019. There wasn’t any serious fighting, but we argued back and forth a bit, deciding to table it for now.

For backstory, my wife and I currently live in Florida, my family is in New England, about a 2.5 hour flight away.  We live within 1 hour of all of my wife’s family that she keeps in touch with (including my in-laws 30 minutes away), meaning we spend the entire year doing birthday parties, Thanksgiving, Easter, etc. with them. I am totally cool with this, as all of us (myself included) have a great relationship with them. I miss my family a lot during these times, but we live here and I love her family so we always enjoy ourselves, no big deal.

Thus far, we have gone to New England for Christmas because she agreed that her family got everything else so it was only fair. We always made a point to have a nice little Christmas in early December with her family to make up for the fact that we wouldn’t be here. I think what bothers me about my wife’s reasoning this time is that she seems to want to stay this year out of fear of her mother’s reaction to not spending our daughter’s first Christmas with her. I am sensitive to this but just don’t feel we should stay only to appease her mother’s discomfort, as my wife puts this at the center of the discussion more than any feelings of hers that would keep us here. I considered that she might be using this to avoid talking about how she wants to stay for her own reasons, but we have a very honest relationship and discuss these things frankly so it’s very unlikely that’s the case.

She seems trapped between a rock and a hard place so I’m not pressing the issue, but barring something really important changing in her reasoning I can’t see changing my stance on this. Her family gets the other 99% of the year and I just don’t think it’s unreasonable to dig my heels in on this. 