I [35F] just spent my first Christmas with my fiancé's [31F] family. How can I walk things back to doing holidays separately?
Lila and I have been dating for two years, engaged and living together for one of them. She's extremely close with her family and we fly out to visit them probably 3-4 times per year at least. I've always really liked them (and from everything she and they have told me, they like me a lot too), but we come from very different backgrounds and after this first longer holiday visit I find myself feeling like I'm too uptight and high-maintenance to consistently do major holidays with them going forward.
For context: I grew up a big coastal city as part of a small and very type-A family, my brother is estranged and my mother passed away when I was in my teens so it's really just my dad and I now. Lila's family lives in the small rural town where she grew up, and she's the only one who's ever left the area; her brothers and sister all live within an hour's drive. They're unpretentious and down-to-earth folks, which is in some ways a breath of fresh air compared to how I was raised, but I've realized that as terrible as this makes me sound...I kinda hit my limit with some aspects of it after about 3 nights (we're here for 8 this time).
There's obviously a lot to unpack as to why, but a few of the big reasons:
I'm very allergic to cats and they have four, one of which used to be Lila's until we moved in together. Even on the maximum dose of Claritin and two rounds of allergy shots I'm usually completely stuffed up and miserable after a couple days here, especially since their standards of clean are a lot more relaxed than mine. The obvious solution to this one would be "stay in a hotel", but we've tried that and all it did was quadruple the price of the trip and make Lila sad that we were missing out on some of the late-night family time. It didn't even help my allergies much because we ended up spending so much time over there during the day anyway (there's not a lot else to do in town, and they're big homebodies besides).
I'm a vegan, which they have a lot of trouble accommodating since they're absolutely "meat and cheese in everything" types. I try to eat some animal products while I'm here so as not to be a burden, but after so long they tend to really upset my stomach even in small quantities. I've tried offering to buy/prepare my own ingredients and meals but I can tell this rubs the family the wrong way, since food is a big love language for them. They try their best, they just really struggle with figuring out how to have options around for me, especially since it's easy to forget to check the ingredients on things like seasoning mixes and sauces.
Their biggest pastimes are watching (or talking about) sports and playing cards, neither of which I did much of growing up. I've made an effort to learn more about both over the past few years so I can participate, but I still have trouble keeping up.
All in all, after about day 4 of this trip I found myself feeling like the villainous "high-maintenance big-city fiancé who's clearly wrong for the sweet small-town main character and gets dumped halfway through the movie" from every Hallmark Christmas film ever. Lila's family was (as always) extremely welcoming and kind to me, but I'm obviously still in my head.
And beyond all that, maybe the biggest thing is that this is the first Christmas where I've "chosen" a partner's family over spending the holiday with my dad, and it felt horrible. He put on a brave face about it, but each time I've talked with him this week I can tell how sad and lonely he is. The idea was originally to invite him to spend Christmas with Lila's family too starting next year, but my dad is even more of an uptight nerd than I am (he was an anesthesiologist and basically only knows how to interact with other introverted science-y types), and if I felt this out of place I can't imagine how much more uncomfortable he'd feel in this setting. And even though my family is so small compared to Lila's, the idea of never spending a Christmas in my family home again actually makes me really sad, more so than I expected it would.
All this to say, I'm trying to figure out how to pitch the idea of going back to doing Christmases separately to Lila, without sounding like a horrible snooty ingrate. I was considering suggesting alternating whose family we do Thanksgiving with, so that we still spend a major holiday with each other's families regularly, but just going to our respective hometowns at Christmas (we don't want children, so this wouldn't create a who-gets-to-see-the-grandkids issue in the future). But then again, how can I even bring this up when she's so close with them? Even today she was getting teary because she's sad we only have two days left before we leave, meanwhile I'm crawling up the walls. I just don't know how to approach this without making her and her family feel totally rejected, and I'm at a loss here.
Tl;dr my fiance's family are wonderful people, but staying with them for prolonged periods is a struggle for me and leaving my dad alone at Christmas is breaking my heart. How can I suggest that we go back to doing Christmas separately?