You know what they say, you don't just marry one person, you marry their entire family. Sometimes this can seem like a blessing, but when it comes time to make your holiday plans, too much family can start to feel like too much of a good thing! For newlyweds and engaged couples, it can become challenging to sort out the competing invitations from both families, carve out special couple time to create new traditions, and keep everyone happy in the process. This is some advice on how to make the most of your holidays while keeping the peace in your families.

The first holiday season spent as newlyweds or as an engaged couple can be the hardest to deal with logistically. When a couple gets married, their first commitment is to one another, not to their individual families. Wherever they end up celebrating, they will surely be together...which inevitably means that one set of parents will be left disappointed.

The best way to deal with competing holiday plans is often to set up an alternating schedule. The couple might spend Thanksgiving with the bride's family and Christmas with the groom's. This could be a fairly stable arrangement from year to year, or there could be an agreement that they will alternate families for Thanksgiving and Christmas each year. The newlyweds might decide to claim Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve as their own special private time.

The alternating holiday schedule is only one option for dealing with splitting the holidays between two families. Another possibility is to agree to attend the holiday event that is most important in each family annually. Perhaps
Thanksgiving is the one day of the year when the groom's entire extended family gets together and it is a can't-miss event for him. Maybe the bride's parents host a New Year's Day brunch every year and her presence would be sorely missed. While no family will be pleased to have their son or daughter absent for the other holidays, if they have them present for their most significant family gathering, it will help ease the blow.

Logistics can also play a role in working out the holiday schedule for newlyweds. If one family is close and the other is a plane ride away, a couple might spend the short Thanksgiving holiday with the closer family and a the longer Christmas break with the other family (especially once kids and school vacations become a factor).

An often overlooked option is for the newlyweds or engaged couple to start a new family tradition by inviting everyone to their home. This can be a great way to get both families together at the same time. It is also a good option when the bride or groom's parents have more time or money for traveling than the young couple does. While it might take the parents some time to get accustomed to the idea of a new way of doing things over the holidays, in the end it can work out very well.

A final tip is to be open to new things. Each family has long-standing ways to celebrate holidays, which over time can start to seem like the only “right” way to do it. Just because your spouse's family does something differently than your own would does not make it wrong, and they may well have traditions which are new to you that you might like to adopt as your own.

Both the bride and groom's families will have something special to bring to the holiday season, and the newlyweds or engaged couple will likely be happiest if they look for ways to blend the best of all those customs into new holiday traditions of their very own.