The holidays are now here, and that means family gatherings -- and lots of them.

You see, I live in a split family, which means that I spend my holidays a little differently than a lot of my friends do. It isn't all bad, though; sure, there's a lot of traveling involved (not my favorite thing), but other parts of it are great. Here's what it's like celebrating the holidays in a split family:

Scheduling is a little crazy.

Every holiday starts out at my dad's parents' house (who my siblings and I live with), then we travel to my mom's parents' house after we've finished eating lunch with my dad's parents, then we spend a couple of days with them and go to our mother's mother's house to finish off the 3-day-long celebration. At Christmas, we also go to a holiday party for my mother's step-father's side of the family the weekend before Christmas. Got all that? Good, because it takes me a minute to get it straight sometimes.

You get to eat lots and lots of food.

My favorite part of the holidays is -- you guessed it, the food. I am a big fan of holiday food, and the fact that I have three and four parties per holiday to go to means that I get to eat enough to last me through the end of January. The only downside is that you wind up eating nothing but Thanksgiving food for like, four days straight, but you know, it could be a lot worse.

You have to explain how your life is going to at least 50 people at every holiday party.

Since my family isn't all together at the holidays and I have to travel to multiple peoples' houses, I have to tell everyone in every household how my school life is, if I'm dating anyone, how Christmas was at fill-in-the-blank's house, and many, many other questions that I don't have time to list here. To be honest, it gets a little tiring to have to answer the same questions over and over and over again at like, 5 different parties, but at least everyone cares enough to ask, right?

You're really, really tired once the holidays are over.

All of the traveling and all of the food in your belly can make you super tired once the holidays have ended. Sleeping until New Year's after you've traveled a ton and eaten loads and loads of ham and finger sandwiches probably isn't a super healthy thing to do, but... yeah, it happens.

Explaining what you did over the holidays to your friends gets really, really confusing.

It's like, "Well, first I went and saw so-and-so, and then I went to this person's house -- no, wait, this other person's house, then the first person's house, and -- um, yeah, I traveled a lot. How about you?"

You wind up missing everyone once the holidays are over.

Yes, the traveling is tiring and answering a ton of questions about my life is annoying, but all in all, I love my family, and getting to spend the holidays with them, even if we have to do it separately, is a huge, huge gift, and I wouldn't trade any of the parties or awkward conversations for the world.

My family may not all be together during the holidays, but I don't consider us broken -- we just do things a little differently than your average family might. If you come from a split family like I do, well, you know what I mean better than anyone.

Happy Holidays, friends. Enjoy the food, and, most of all, enjoy spending time with your loved ones, even if you do have to jump around a lot to see them all.