Woman explains what to do when both sides of the family host Thanksgiving dinner

‘Tis the holiday season, which means celebrations, family dinners, party invites, gift exchanges and more. One feels compelled to attend each of these celebrations and dinners. While the ‘idea’ of the holiday season is absolutely what it should be, the stress and effort one has to put in to fulfill this idea can be overwhelming. Scheduling the entire holiday season to tick off the plethora of invites can be exhausting and it isn’t fair either on yourself or your family not to be able to relax and breathe in the festive vibes. Blaire Allison—who goes by @blaire_allison on TikTok–shares her take on holiday invites and visiting family members for Thanksgiving. She had one simple thing to say, “You do not have to go.”

The video begins with Allison’s straight face saying, “You do not have to go to someone's house on Thanksgiving or Christmas or any holiday if you do not want to go if you do not have the time to go if you do not want to drag your kids there. You don’t have to go.” Allison’s simply put point is definitely a thinker because why spend your precious annual holiday season doing something you do not want to do? She continued, “Stop feeling bad for not going places on the holidays if it doesn’t work out for you and your family.”

Due to everyone’s different circumstances, there can be multiple homes that you may be invited to, but fulfilling those might mean not having a single moment to yourself during the holidays. Throwing light on this fact, Allison further added, “I come from a broken family, my husband comes from a broken family. So you can only imagine the amount of Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners that we have to go to.”

She also revealed that she was “the type of mom” who felt that they “have to go everywhere, we have to please everyone” and this used to cause a lot of arguments between her and her husband. She then boldly said, “It’s not possible and it’s not fair to the children. It’s not fair to children that they get home too late on Christmas Eve. It is not fair to children that on Christmas Day, you have to rush them to open their presents because you have to make sure they’re at the next place by ten or 11:00 a.m. It’s not fair to them.” She highlighted an extremely critical insight, “Remember, your children are little once.” She continued, “Do you want their Christmas memories to be filled with mommy and daddy rushing them to open presents or do you want their memories to be filled with love, patience and focusing on them?”

Giving everyone something to think about, she concluded the video by saying, “Do what’s best for you and your children, not what’s best for other people.” Allison’s video went viral, gaining over 1M views on the platform. The comment section couldn’t agree more with Allison and @cakedupclarissa added the financial aspect and said, “Or the money to go too! Don’t go into debt trying to please the family.” While talking about a family’s traditions, @brownsuga777 said, “Family can pick a different weekend. When you create your own family, you start your own traditions!”