You have mail

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all !! Thanks to anyone that shared a bit of their garden with me this past year...I have learned sooo much and cant wait to get wintersowing !!!!! Angie..thanks for the great card ! Bea...I heard from wenders !! I sent her a card, and heard back from her... Enjoy your holiday !

They look pretty healthy.

To be honest, I don't really see what the big deal is about parents taking kids away for holidays even if they are divorced. I'm 22 now, but my parents have been divorced since I was very young, so pretty much every holiday I can remember has been spent with either one parent or the other. They both continued to live close by each other even after the divorce, but both of their extended families (my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins etc.) lived significant distances away. If either of them wanted me to have a real "family" holiday travel was necessary. I never really thought of it as a big deal if I only saw one parent over a holiday, especially since I was surrounded by so many other family members I rarely got to see, and my other parent lived close enough to me that I could see them on a regular basis anyway. When my father remarried he and his wife often spent holidays with her family. If I was with my mother, even if we were going to be at home, he would still travel with her. I never saw this as a slight to me, and it never made me feel like he didn't care about me, I just viewed it as him making his own plans the same way my mother and I did. I was always invited to go with my father, and did on occasion, but I never felt like if I said no he should drop everything to stay home and have a 2-hour dinner with me to assuage some kind of divorced dad guilt. From the sounds of it, the OP's 17-year-old SS already has a difficult relationship with his father, and I don't think he's going to look back and point to this one particular Christmas as being the cause of the problems between him and his dad. I think as long as he knows he is invited to spend Christmas with his father then, even if he chooses not to, there really isn't a problem with his dad and SM going to Florida. Yes, his parents won't be near each other so he won't be able to see both on Christmas, but that's just one of the realities of divorce. Sooner or later he's going to have to get used to the fact that his parents don't plan their lives around each other and their plans might not allow him to see both of them at the same time.