When creating an effective parenting plan, one of the biggest priorities for many parents is the holiday parenting schedule. This is the term we use to refer to how certain holidays are defined and divided between the parents. Because there is no single law that defines or assigns holidays, it is very important that your parenting plan does this in a way that is clear and fair to minimize future conflict.
By default, most family court judges consider Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas as major holidays subject to division in their parenting plans. Some judges include other holidays and may also assign adjacent weekends for certain holidays (like Labor Day or Memorial Day) to better enable potential travel or other celebration.
Obviously this list is not comprehensive and there may be other holidays that are significant to your family. This can be an incentive to try to settle outside of court. It will give you and your coparent so much more control over the specific schedule, including the designation of specific holidays, the exchange times, and any other provisions you want to include in your parenting plan.
If you can't settle and you have to go to trial, we always recommend submitting a comprehensive proposed parenting plan so that your judge has a better understanding of family traditions or observance of particular holidays that you would like to be included in your parenting plan. The orders still may not be exactly what you want, but this is the best approach when leaving the schdedule up to your judge.
Now we will talk about how the holidays usually are divided. While specific holiday schedules vary from case to case, the variations can be broadly categorized as one of three types of holiday parenting schedules.
Alternate holidays every year
The most common type of holiday parenting schedule divides all holidays into two groups, we will name Holiday Group 1 and Holiday Group 2, and assigns each Group to either parent in alternating years.
We will use the unofficial default holiday list above to illustrate how this works:
This is a purely hypothetical illustration of how alternate holiday division can work in child custody cases. Even though this is the most common method, especially among family law judges, specific holiday schedules still vary from case to case. The idea is to give parents equal holiday parenting time.
The same holidays every year
Sometimes parents have more certain holidays and family traditions that they want to observe every year. Maybe one parent prefers Christmas Eve to Christmas Day or the parents observe different cultural holidays.
In these child custody cases, parents may want specific holidays assigned to the same parent every year. Unfortunately, if the parents cannot privately agree, this schedule can be difficult to achieve at trial. Judges prefer to divide holidays as close to equally as possible. However, if one parent observes a holiday the other parent does not, such as a cultural new year or a different religious holiday, it may be possible to assign that specific holiday to the observing parent each year while using an alternate schedule for the other mutually observed holidays.
Split holiday parenting time with both parents
The final archetype of holiday parenting schedules divides each holiday between both parents every year. For example, maybe Parent A exercises parenting time 4-6 p.m. on Halloween before Parent B has the children from 6-8 p.m.
This method is by far the least common because it requires parents to maintain an exceptional coparenting relationship and coparenting during the holidays can be very difficult. Split schedules often lead to conflict, especially if one parent is late to the parenting exchange because each parent’s time is so limited. More commonly, this type of schedule is used only for the children’s birthdays to ensure that both parents are able to see the children on their birthday every year.
