Four Steps to Sharing Holidays After Divorce or Separation

So you’re thinking about getting a divorce and you’re unsure how sharing the holidays with your children would work? 

If you’re considering or post-divorce and wondering how to manage holiday co-parenting schedules, you’re not alone.

Here are our top four pieces of advice for parents who want a peaceful— and flexible— holiday arrangement for their children:

1. Never trade holiday time for marital assets.

This isn’t just a legal guideline— it’s wisdom earned from watching clients struggle to modify bad agreements.  Some parts of your Separation Agreement are set in stone, including the division of assets and debts. However, parenting time, including your holiday schedule, is modifiable. You don’t want to trade assets that you may be entitled to for having Christmas Eve every year because that arrangement could change with a future modification. It’s trading apples for oranges and is a bad deal.

2. Build travel time into your agreement.

It’s easy to forget the logistics when you’re focused on “winning” the holiday itself. But if your loved ones are  in North Carolina and you only get time on Thanksgiving Day, you won’t have enough time to travel to enjoy the holiday with your family. . Consider defining “Thanksgiving” as “the Wednesday before Thanksgiving through the Sunday after Thanksgiving.” Clearly outlining travel schedules ensures you get meaningful, usable time— not just time that exists on a calendar.

3. Follow cues from sharing holidays during your marriage.

If you and your former partner celebrated Christmas Eve with your in-laws and Christmas Day with your family, it could be a natural progression to keep this arrangement for your post-divorce holiday sharing schedule. Or if you always traveled to see your family in Maine over the 4th of July, you could consider offering that your co-parent get Easter in exchange for you to preserve this yearly tradition.

4. Try to work it out (if possible!) before you get a judge involved.

No one is better equipped to design a holiday plan that truly fits your family than the two of you. Bringing a judge into the equation introduces a third party who will do their best, but may not land on a plan that feels personal or practical. Usually they order one of two holiday schedules – either share the day (You get morning of holiday, ex-partner gets afternoon/evening) or alternating holidays (You get holiday in even years, ex-partner gets holiday in odd years), leaving much less room for flexibility and room for respecting former traditions.
If your ex is being petty or uncooperative, then yes, court may become necessary. But if both of you are open to compromise, mediation can give you a more balanced and sustainable arrangement, keeping the focus on quality time, not on tallying up who “wins” which year.

For more tips like these, make sure you’ve signed up on our email list, as at the beginning of the month we send out a snippet of the blog to our subscribers, along with a note from our founder Jolee and other fun info!