Holiday custody cases clutter Family Court

Bill Gang

Friday, Jan. 2, 1998 | 11:14 a.m.

In her first holiday season as a Family Court judge, Cynthia Dianne Steel found there was a premium on Christmas spirit in the courtroom that deals with tragedy and tears more often than togetherness.

"Some people were being very Grinchy," she said this week, finally finding some breathing room after the holiday crush of cases subsided.

As it is every year for each of the eight Family Court judges, there was a flurry of last-minute requests for court decisions about which parent gets what holiday time with which children.

"It was hectic and heartbreaking for me," said Steel, recalling that often newly divorcing parents both tearfully complained that they had never been separated from their children on Christmas Day.

"I reminded them that they were getting divorced and unless they could fall back in love for a day, only one was going to get to play Santa," she said.

Whether a child still believes in Santa Claus played a big role in her decision.

"If a child still believes in Santa, I leave him or her in the same place Christmas Eve and most of Christmas Day," the rookie judge said. "When they go to sleep, they want Santa to come to the place where they are sleeping."

Steel said she generally awarded the other parent Christmas afternoon and evening.

She emphasized, however, that there was no "cookie-cutter" formula for determining holiday visits and such factors as who had custody on Thanksgiving or if there were domestic violence problems.

"I tried to do things as even-handedly as possible, but I'm not going to make everybody happy," Steel lamented, noting that most of the last-minute cases involved "Santa Claus stuff" rather than cases with older children.

One note of holiday cheer involved a case where a father had taken the couple's 6-year-old son out of state without permission and had told the child his mother didn't love him anymore.

"I ordered them back to Nevada," said Steel, explaining that after learning of the story she set up a reunion between mother and son.

Steel choked back tears as she told how the diminutive mother picked up the boy and cried as she carried him around the room, and of the look on the boy's face when he realized his father's version of the tale was a lie.

"Those are the good things," said the judge, who added that the mother now has custody of the boy pending a hearing.

In another case, a father wound up in a hospital because of an accident and his parents wanted custody of their grandson for Christmas.

Steel said the mother demanded custody even though it was the father's turn to have the child for Christmas and celebrations were arranged at the grandparents' home. The mother argued that, under the law, custody must be given to a natural parent and, since the father was incapacitated, she should have the child.

But Steel sympathized with the grandparents because their son might not survive his injuries and it was fair that the only link to him -- the boy -- spend Christmas where it had been planned.

While Steel said she worked in as many last-minute requests as she could, her calendar didn't allow her to handle all the cases awaiting her decisions.

"It's hard. Everyone wants to spend Christmas with their kids.

"Sometimes it was a situation of just poor planning," she said, noting that some couples were in her court just weeks before Christmas and never raised the issue of holiday visitation.

Steel said she knew there was going to be a last-minute rush and managed to cut down on some of it by asking litigants as early as October what their holiday plans were.

"Next year I'm going to start sooner than October," she said.