I’m about done with trying to please both my parents and mother in law on each holiday. As mentioned above, MIL is the morbidly obese ex-school teacher who lives alone a couple hours away. She LOVES the Lutheran church. Plays the organ every week. It’s basically her only time out of the house other than the grocery store and fast food.
My wife, a saint, talks to lonely MIL every night on the phone, often on speakerphone. Christmas is my families this year. So generally we go down a Christmas Eve and come back home and MIL comes down for Christmas dinner and stays a couple of days. Well now, since she doesn’t think she can sit in the car for two hours (she’s driven this regularly in the past year) and she’s the one the has plans (playing church services that she volunteers for), we should cater to her and drive the 5 hours from my parents to her. She’s playing the woe is me “I guess I’ll have McDonalds for Christmas” card and “I guess I won’t even decorate because nobody will come see it”. We were just there for Thanksgiving Eve and Thanksgiving. I don’t want to give in. My parents generally wouldn’t care, as they are rational, kind humans. I just don’t want to cater to the MIL’s demands over things she can fix. She can lose weight. She’s capable of driving. She can not play the day after church service. We are both only children with no kids of our own and I know it makes us flexible but god damn.