The holidays in a Florida family case are governed by a specific part of your parenting plan, and it is usually not the part you have been living by all year. Most plans carry a separate holiday schedule, written so that schedule controls the days it names even when those days sit inside the other parent's ordinary week. So the first step, before any conversation with your co-parent, is to read the holiday section of your own plan and put the real dates and times on a calendar.
What follows is the practical side of the season, from enforcement to travel to the timing of a filing. If what you need instead is help with how your children are handling a first holiday season after a separation, our post on parental separation during the holidays is written for that.
The holiday schedule usually overrides the regular rotation
Most Florida parenting plans follow the Florida Supreme Court approved form, which builds the year in layers: the weekday and weekend schedule first, then holidays, then winter break, spring break and summer, then transportation and travel notice. The holiday layer sits on top of the others. So Thanksgiving can be your day even though the whole week belongs to your co-parent under the regular rotation, and neither parent is doing anything wrong when that happens. The plan is working the way it was drafted.
Holiday disputes are rarely about who gets Christmas. They are about the details underneath, so check what your plan says about:
- Exact start and end times. "Christmas Day" without hours is an argument waiting to happen.
- Who transports the child, and to where.
- Whether the holiday schedule alternates by year, and which parent has which year.
- How winter break is divided, which is often handled separately from Christmas Day itself.
- Notice deadlines for out of town travel, usually counted in days before departure.
- Whether a term prevents one parent from having three weekends in a row when a holiday lands beside their regular weekend.
If a provision reads "as the parties shall agree," that is not a schedule. It is a place where the plan assumed cooperation, and if that has stopped, the clause is the gap to fix. Where a plan is silent on a holiday, the ordinary rotation simply runs. What a plan must contain is covered on our parenting plans and time-sharing page.
When a co-parent will not follow the schedule
Confirm the schedule in writing well before the date, propose a specific time and place rather than a general complaint, and keep it in one written channel, so there is a record that reads clearly later.
Florida law provides remedies. Under section 61.13(4)(c) of the Florida Statutes, when a parent refuses to honor the other parent's rights under the time-sharing schedule without proper cause, the court is required to calculate the time improperly denied and award enough extra time-sharing to make up for it, scheduled promptly and at a time convenient for the parent who lost the time. The court may also order that parent to pay the reasonable court costs and attorney's fees of enforcing the schedule, order a parenting course or community service, shift the financial burden of travel where the parents live more than 60 miles apart, modify the parenting plan at the request of the parent who did not violate it, or impose other reasonable sanctions.
Here is the honest part. Those remedies are mostly retrospective: what the statute delivers is the time back, not the day itself. A December 25 that does not happen is generally addressed afterward, through makeup time-sharing and sometimes fees, not by a judge restoring the afternoon while it is still going on. Our page on post judgment enforcement explains how these motions are brought. Avoid withholding the next block of time in return, which puts your own compliance in front of the judge as well.
What a court can realistically do between Thanksgiving and the new year
Florida courts close for legal holidays. The rule governing how court deadlines are counted treats Thanksgiving Day, the Friday after Thanksgiving, Christmas Day and New Year's Day as legal holidays, and the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit publishes its own annual closures for Hillsborough County. Hearing time in the family division is set in advance, so the December calendar is largely spoken for by late fall.
Circuits do keep a judge available for emergency matters, but the standard is narrow. It generally requires an imminent risk to a child's safety, or a credible risk that a child will be taken out of the state. A missed holiday exchange, standing alone, is usually not treated that way. So the realistic timeline is that a late December dispute is heard after the new year, with makeup time as the remedy. That is not a reason to do nothing. It is a reason to raise a foreseeable problem in October, while there is room for an agreement or a hearing.
Travel and trips out of state
A vacation is not a relocation. Florida's relocation statute reaches a change in a parent's principal residence of at least 50 miles for at least 60 consecutive days, and it expressly excludes temporary absences for vacation, education, or health care.
Your parenting plan is the document that matters instead. Most plans require written notice before out of state or foreign travel by a stated deadline, with an itinerary and where the child can be reached. Missing the deadline, not the trip, is the usual failure. International travel needs a longer runway: a United States passport for a child under 16 requires the consent of both parents, either by both appearing together or by a notarized statement of consent from the parent who cannot appear.
Filing before the holidays or waiting until January
There is no universally correct answer, and both choices are reasonable. What helps is knowing what filing does and does not do. It does not by itself produce a schedule: until there is an agreed temporary parenting plan or a temporary order, there is nothing to enforce, which is why a parent expecting a December dispute is better served by seeking temporary relief early. Filing also does not finish anything quickly, because no final judgment of dissolution may be entered until at least 20 days after the petition is filed, unless the court finds that injustice would result.
What it does do is start deadlines that run through the season, including the time to respond after service and the financial disclosure that follows it. Someone also gets served, and the timing of that is something you can plan rather than leave to chance. Waiting has its own cost, mainly that the calendar starts later. Our divorce page sets out the sequence of a Florida case.
Extended family and new partners
Extended family time happens inside your own time-sharing, not alongside it. A grandparent's expectation of Christmas Eve does not create a right against the schedule, and Florida grants grandparents court ordered visitation only in narrow circumstances. If a wider gathering matters to you, build it into your own days, or propose a swap early enough that your co-parent can plan around it. Some plans also carry negotiated terms about introducing a new partner or about overnight guests, and where yours has one it applies at the holidays like any other week.
What to do this month
Put the dates, times and exchange locations on a calendar with the travel notice deadlines beside them, then confirm the schedule with your co-parent in writing while those dates are still weeks away. If the plan is ambiguous, or the last two seasons produced the same argument, the time to address that is now, while there is still room to reach an agreement or to be heard.