Alternating holidays without arguing about it every year

Holidays cause more custody conflict than the weekly schedule, and usually not because anyone is being difficult. The terms in the plan are just ambiguous enough that both parents can read them honestly and get different answers.

Write the holiday as a rule, not a date

December 25 is a fixed date. Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday of November. Memorial Day is the last Monday in May. If your plan lists specific dates for a specific year, it stops being useful the following year, and someone has to renegotiate.

Stated as rules, they resolve themselves forever: which parent had it in a starting year, and alternate from there.

Decide the shoulder days now

Does Christmas mean December 25 alone, or the 24th through the 26th? Does Thanksgiving include the Friday? These are the arguments that happen at 9pm the night before, and they are trivial to settle in advance by writing down how many days before and after the holiday count.

Also decide the handoff time. 'Christmas Eve' with no hour attached is not an agreement.

Say which rule wins

When a holiday lands inside the other parent's normal weekend, one of them has to give. State clearly that holiday terms take priority over the weekly pattern, and that a mutually agreed swap takes priority over both.

That single sentence removes most future disputes, because there is now a right answer rather than two reasonable interpretations.

Check it against several years before you rely on it

Once the rules are written, look at how they resolve across the next three or four years. Odd-and-even alternation sometimes gives one parent the same holiday twice in a row when a second rule overlaps, and it is much easier to notice that on a preview than in December.

Custody Captain previews each holiday rule several years ahead and shows exactly which parent it lands on, so you can confirm the wording says what you meant.