Does anyone else never get stepkids for holidays? 

Thanksgiving is next week and BM is refusing to agree to any custody time. It's the same song and dance every year she starts off ignoring DH then moves on to making excuses, they negotiate and she adds impossible or inconvenient terms and then my DH relents and decides not to bother.

At first it was BM making sure that SD12 never came but now it's SD choosing to stay at BM's. Every year there is an excuse and this year the excuses that they normally use are either not holding up or they're using Covid as an excuse. BM also has this habit of creating some really annoying time constraint or condition so that it ends up being my DH who has to be the bad guy and refuse. 

SD won't come for Thanksgiving mostly because BM considers Black Friday a holiday. This is one of the most annoying examples of this condition. Since she and SD like to go out and do their shopping beginning Thursday evening the condition for having her for Thanksgiving is that she needs to be returned to bm's house at 9:00 p.m. so they can be ready to go shopping. We live about two and a half hours away, it normally takes even longer with holiday traffic. In order to return SD on Thanksgiving evening my husband would have to leave our house by about 6:00. The amount of time that BM agrees to amounts to less than 24 hours and my husband would have to drive 10 hours round trip in order to have SD there for our meal. This is one of bm's favorite tactics to use whenever we have a special event that she knows my husband can't leave or would love to have maybe a glass or two of some alcohol she always demands The SD be returned that night, therefore ruining whatever party we have planned. So in this type of condition my DH usually refuses. she often tries to avoid an overnight so that means that she wants my husband to pick her up in the morning and then drop her off in the evening. 5 hours in the morning and 5 hours in the evening to drive and do the pickup and drop off mean that my husband wouldn't even be home enough to help with cooking or clean up or visiting with guests (in the time before Covid) it was so transparently controlling and I'm glad my DH bit the bullet to be the bad guy and said no.

We never have SD on Christmas or the day before or after. The most she and BM will agree to is a couple days in the week between Christmas and New year's but that hasn't happened lately. Of course SD also refuses to be around us for New year's Eve because she can't possibly miss BMs party and we are "too boring" (how do you know if you're never here?). Depending on my husband and my work schedule we usually can't make whatever scraps of days that BM allows at the last minute to work so again we have to refuse. This is her second major tactic she refuses to pin down any sort of custody time until less than a week before.

SD regularly ignores my DH whenever he reaches out to communicate with her using any means. However after Black Friday she usually is a lot more receptive because she knows that it's gift-giving season. However my husband put up a pretty good boundary all on his own in regards to gifts. he will ask SD what she wants and oftentimes she will send him a links to expensive designer things she wants. He would get her anything she wants but he places the condition that he would like to give it to her in person. Last year SD whined and complained that he would not just order and send what she wanted directly to BM's house. SD then refused to see or speak to DH for months after this. BM graciously let DH know why this was right before SD's birthday, in June. her tactic this time was to guilt trip him into feeling like he was a terrible father that chose to skip Christmas and he needed to make it up by buying SD a lot of things for her birthday. He stuck to his guns here and said he would love to take SD shopping for her birthday. Of course SD just wanted to send him a wish list of expensive items for him to mail directly to her. 

Holidays have been depressing for my husband for obvious reasons. The last few years we didn't really celebrate Christmas because he either had to go on a work trip or because our daughter was only a couple months old and we decided to just go to my parents house and let them take care of all the decorating. This year my daughter is a toddler and it's time to start doing the holiday festivities a bit more in our house. I'm hoping that now that we have my daughter and we can create some magical memories for her that it might help my husband have some happier associations with Christmas and other holidays.

For those of you in similar situations that have bio kids now did they help your SO stop being so mopey around the holidays or were they still a drag on your family's celebrations because the stepkids weren't there?