A new approach to holiday time allocation blues

[Gwen in VA]

(The following was inspired by a recent turf war between my parents and in-laws who live too close for either of their comfort)

 

Dear Parents and In-Laws,

 

We are truly blessed to be loved so much by all of you that you want to see as much of us as possible. Living 600 miles away from all of you, we certainly don’t see as much of you as we would like.

 

Our popularity with both sides of the family, however, seems to cause squabbling at Christmas time. We feel like a much-loved toy being fought over by two toddlers; both sets of parents want us to themselves and resent the time we spend with the other set. This discord has caused us much stress over the years.

 

As engineers, we like numerical solutions to problems. After much thought, we have invented what we think is the ideal solution to these annual holiday wranglings. We would like to propose an accounting system to settle holiday visit disputes based on the time-honored parenting technique of using a timer to allocate playtime with a favored toy. With this easy-to-implement system, all of you will be guaranteed equal time with us.

 

The Peace at Xmas (PaX) accounting system is simple – for each hour we spend visiting with you, you receive a point. We arrange our visiting schedule so that at the end of our vacation, both sets of points are equal. Assuming that we don’t get stuck in traffic on the New Jersey turnpike, this year we will be in Massachusetts for approximately 134 hours, so we will plan to spend 67 hours with each family. Why didn’t we think of this simple approach years ago?

 

Of course, there are a few kinks in the system still, and we would appreciate your help in ironing these out.

 

The biggest challenge of the PaX system involves the simple fact that not all hours are of equal value. An hour in the middle of the night is worth much less than an hour at dinnertime. Should the PaX points reflect the value of the time or merely the numbers of hours spent in proximity?

 

A prime example of heavily-valued time is Christmas. Loaded with turkey, presents, and memories, Christmas Day is the jackpot. Since Christmas Day is so special, should we spend additional time with the family that doesn’t see us on Christmas Day to compensate for the fact that that family didn’t experience the memory-making day with us? Is an hour of Christmas worth really more than any other hour? Should the PaX system count Christmas Day hours as double or even triple points? And what about Christmas Eve? Is it also special enough to merit a change to the PaX system for those few hours?

 

A related accounting issue involves low-value time – the time spent sleeping. We do require those eight hours of shut-eye each night (though we’ve been known to get by on six). Is an hour of us snoring away in your house in the dead of night equivalent to an hour of visiting at noon? Should the PaX system reflect the lower value of those nighttime hours by not counting the hours spent sleeping? Or does the joy of having us at your house overnight maybe make those dark hours equivalent to a half-hour of daytime visiting?

 

And what about those sleepy hours just before and just after the shut-eye period? We can’t guarantee that we will go to bed at 10. The conversation may be so scintillating that we are up into the wee hours, or perhaps we head to bed at a sensible hour but we have insomnia and while prowling around the house end up having a first-class discussion with you about the meaning of life. We can’t predict whether or not those hours between 7am and 9am and also between 10pm and midnight will be social times or not. So perhaps we should count them has a half-hour of prime visiting? Or would counting them as a quarter point work out better?

 

Further complications continue to rear their ugly heads. If we go to visit friends, clearly neither set of parents receives PaX points, but what if only part of the family leaves to visit friends?

 

What effect do different activities have on the value of the visiting time? If we shop with you, does each hour count as one PaX point, or, since we may be preoccupied trying to figure out if the store has any green sweaters in size 8, do those hours merely count as partial PaX points? What if we are sick? Illness does prevent top-quality visiting. The complications and variations on the complications multiply even as I write.

 

And what about extended family? When we arrive, we have not only you parents but also brothers, sisters, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, nieces and nephews to see. But the numbers in each family are not equal. One family has six additional relatives, while the other has twenty-nine. Should the PaX points awarded during a large gathering be less, since obviously more people results in fewer minutes of conversation per relative so we need more time to have equivalent moments in conversation? Or since the one family has so many members and we are smaller fraction of that family, should the PaX system reflect the fact that our presence contributes less to the overall gathering?

 

Eventually, we would like to expand the PaX accounting system, which merely tracks Christmas visiting hours, into a Peace all Year (PaY) program. We believe that this system will help us have guilt-free visits throughout the year. New difficulties arise, however, when we consider the increased scope of the PaY program.

 

Chief among the new set of issues in the PaY program would be visiting. One set of parents visits us considerably more than the other. Do these visiting hours count at regular PaY rate? Or since the parents expended considerable time and money to visit us, do the hours accumulate discounted PaY points?

 

And what about other get-togethers? Do vacation visits accrue points at the normal PaY rate? Does whether or not parents contribute financially to the visit affect the PaY rate? What affect on the PaY rate do missing family members have? For example, if only half of our kids are with us when we visit, do we still use the regular PaY rate of 1 or does the hourly rate get discounted since not all of us were there?

 

Lastly, at what point do we try to even out the PaY points? Obviously the PaX points should be equal at the end of the Christmas visit, but do we even out the PaY points at the end of every year? Two years? Five years? Do we use the calendar year or the Federal Fiscal year? Who is keeping track?

 

Please get back to us with your thoughts. We earnestly desire Peace at Christmas. We would love to experience Peace All Year. We want to be fair in how we spend our time with each extended family. While the PaX/PaY system has a few very minor details that need to be worked out, we feel the PaX/PaY system has the potential to foster Peace in our Time (PioT).

[Chelle in MO]

Oh, Gwen. I'm hearing your pain! Although that was REALLY funny!

 

Chelle

[laurad1125]

I love it!:lol:

[skissugar]

lol that was cute...

 

we have that issue as well.. after years of alternating thanksgiving and Christmas.. we got really tired of squables so we solved it by saying we are staying home for christmas, starting our own traditions. Now we stay home and enjoy christmas and inform family we will visit them during other times of the year.