When our kids were younger, we used to pull them out of school to travel a couple of times a year. Theme parks and ski resorts were nicer on weekdays, and airline award travel was easier when we could borrow a school day here and there. Now that they’re older, we almost never do it. School is harder, of course, and our family calendar is a slow-motion relay race of play rehearsals, music lessons and sports practices.

As far as long trips go, that leaves us with summer vacation, spring break and Christmas. This year, for the first time ever, we’re traveling over Christmas. In fact, we’ll be flying home from Ecuador on Christmas Day. We carefully weighed the pros and cons and decided that Galapagos was worth it.

If you’re skipping Christmas like we are (or technically just rescheduling it by a few days), here are a few tips to make it a success.

Manage family expectations

If you usually celebrate the holidays with your family, you can anticipate a little kicking and screaming when they find out what you’ve got planned. Give them plenty of time to get used to the idea. For example, we dropped the bombshell in July. Once the initial shock wore off, we offered to host a holiday brunch and late gift exchange at our house on December 28. There was some grumbling, but it subsided when we assured everyone that things would be back to normal next year.

Late Christmas doesn’t mean no Christmas

Between buying rugged sandals and stocking up on seasickness medicine, I know the last thing I’m going to want to do the week before our trip is deck the halls. That’s why I bought a small, pre-lit artificial tree (that won’t need to be watered while we’re gone) and blocked off a day the first weekend in December to put up an abbreviated version of our usual holiday decorations.

I explained to the kids that we’d only be hanging our favorite ornaments – not everything. They seemed cool with it. Probably because they have visions of marine iguanas and giant tortoises dancing in their heads.

Give yourself some recovery time

Since we were flying all the way to South America, we were sorely tempted to extend our trip by a week, adding on an excursion to Machu Pichu or sampling the Amazonian rain forest. After all, we were going all that way and those places would be tantalizingly close.

In the end, we decided that giving the kids a few days to recover from the trip was probably a better plan. After all, it’s just not Christmas if you don’t get to sleep in, laze around in your pajamas and play with the stuff that Santa brought you.