My wife and I always have a winter holiday that I call the "fly and flop". In January and February, you don't want culture, you just want to get your bones warm and eat, drink, sleep. We usually go to the Caribbean.
A holiday is when you celebrate something that's all finished up, that happened a long time ago and now there's nothing left to celebrate but the dead.
I don't spend much on clothes. I buy old books. I tell myself I ought to save - it's the classic Northern work ethic. I like good holidays, though. I'm a big fan of cruises. I love unpacking once and having the scenery change every day.
You can leave a kid alone and it will learn to fend for itself, how to work the remote, a tin opener, and the microwave. I see the holidays as a chance for kids to learn self-sufficiency.