The school calendar came home last week with the Thanksgiving and winter break dates on it. You read the holiday paragraph of your custody order, and your co-parent read the same paragraph, and the two of you came away with different answers. Now there is a text thread about it, and it is going badly.

This is the most predictable fight in family law, and it is the one most worth heading off, because the parents who end up in court over Christmas are almost always the ones who waited until December to look.

Your order is the schedule

Start with the thing that surprises people. South Carolina has no statute setting a standard or default holiday schedule. Nothing in the chapter of the South Carolina Code that governs custody and visitation names Thanksgiving or Christmas, fixes alternating years, or says who gets spring break. The words "holiday," "vacation," and "summer" do not appear in it.

What the statutes do is allocate the job. Section 63-15-220(A) requires each parent, at a contested temporary hearing, to file a parenting plan "which reflects parental preferences, the allocation of parenting time to be spent with each parent, and major decisions." Section 63-15-230(D) provides that "notwithstanding the custody determination, the court may allocate parenting time in the best interest of the child."

That second sentence is worth sitting with, because it explains something parents find counterintuitive. The custody label and the calendar are two different things. Joint custody does not automatically mean half of every holiday. The schedule is whatever your order says the schedule is.

So the answer to "who gets the kids for Christmas" is not in a statute, and it is not in what is customary, and it is certainly not in what someone at work told you. It is in your order.

Read it in October, not in December

Pull the order out now and read the holiday provisions as if a stranger wrote them, because in a sense one did. Look for the places where two reasonable people could disagree:

• When does the holiday start and end? "The Thanksgiving holiday" might mean Wednesday after school, or Thursday morning, or the moment the last bell rings on Tuesday.
• Does winter break run to Christmas Day, to New Year's, or to the night before school resumes?
• Whose year is this one? Odd and even years are easy to write and easy to miscount, particularly when a holiday falls near a year boundary.
• Who drives, where, and at what time? Exchange logistics cause more holiday conflict than the dates do.
• Does the holiday schedule override the regular rotation, or stack on top of it? Orders are often silent, and silence is where arguments live.

An order that was perfectly clear when the children were four is frequently unclear when one of them is sixteen, has a job, plays a winter sport, and has opinions. Nothing has gone wrong. The order simply has not aged with the family.

If it needs to change

There are two routes, and the first one is much better than the second.

The first is agreement. Co-parents can and routinely do work out a holiday arrangement between themselves. If you go that way, put it in writing — an email thread that states the dates, the times, and the exchange points is worth a great deal more than a conversation in a parking lot, and it costs nothing.

The second is filing. The custody statute is written to cover both issuing and changing an order: Section 63-15-240(B) begins, "In issuing or modifying a custody order, the court must consider the best interest of the child." But the threshold a parent has to clear before a court will modify an existing order comes from case law rather than from the statute, and it is a real threshold, not a formality. We covered that ground in can you change a custody order in South Carolina.

The practical point is the calendar. A contested modification does not happen in three weeks. If something genuinely has to change before the holidays, October is late but workable. December is not.

Self-help is the expensive option

Every year, somebody decides that the order is unfair, or that the other parent forfeited the holiday by behaving badly, and simply does not produce the children.

The direct cost is contempt. Section 63-3-620 provides that an adult "who wilfully violates, neglects, or refuses to obey or perform a lawful order of the court" may be proceeded against for contempt of court, and may be punished by a fine, a public works sentence, or imprisonment, or a combination — capped at "imprisonment in a local detention facility for one year, a fine of fifteen hundred dollars, or public works sentence of more than three hundred hours."

The quieter cost is worse, and parents rarely see it coming. Among the seventeen best-interest factors in Section 63-15-240(B) is factor 6: "the actions of each parent to encourage the continuing parent-child relationship between the child and the other parent, as is appropriate, including compliance with court orders."

Compliance is written into the test itself. A parent who withholds a holiday has not just breached an order. They have handed the other side evidence on a factor the court is required to weigh — in this case, and in every case that follows it.

If your co-parent is the one withholding, the answer is not to even the score. We wrote about the right response in my ex won't let me see the kids this weekend.

What this means for you

Do three small things this month and you will probably avoid the whole problem.

• Read the order and put the actual dates and times on a calendar — not the gist of them, the dates.
• Send one short, unemotional message to your co-parent confirming what you both understand the schedule to be, and keep the reply. If the two readings differ, you now know in October, which is the entire point.
• And if it turns out the order genuinely does not work any more, say so now, to a lawyer, while there is still room to do something about it in time.

The children, for what it is worth, do not remember which parent won the argument about Thanksgiving. They remember whether there was one.

Stevens Family Law, LLC is devoted exclusively to family law, and our attorneys handle custody and visitation matters in Family Courts across South Carolina. If your holiday schedule is ambiguous, out of date, or simply not being followed, the window to fix it before November is open now and will not be open long. Call our office at (864) 598-9172 or request a consultation.

This article is general information, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Your own order controls your holiday schedule, and what a court will do about changing one depends heavily on the facts of the individual case.