Before my spouse and I had kids, we went home for Christmas every year if we could. We loved seeing our families and sharing traditions. We would try to see as many of our friends and family as we could. But we hated rushing all over the place and not really having a say in what we did to celebrate the holidays. Christmas Day often meant going to at least four different locations. So much driving!
We announced our impending addition to our little family at Christmas while visiting our extended families. It was so much fun! And then we made the decision to not go home for the holidays anymore. It is not that we didn’t love spending time with our families—we did. But we were spending precious time traveling and participating in so many different traditions and celebrating the way other people wanted to celebrate. We wanted to start our own traditions and activities. We wanted to merge what we loved best from each of our family’s customs and make it our own.
Some family members may have been a little offended at first, but we stood our ground and decided what we wanted to do.
For the last 18 years, Christmas has been ours. We put unwrapped gifts in our stockings, and the adults have stockings too. We let the kids open one gift on Christmas Eve. We always have egg casserole, cinnamon rolls, and fresh fruit for breakfast while opening presents. We “open” our stockings before we open any presents. We take turns opening presents one at a time, so we can appreciate the gifts and the joy each person has as they discover what’s inside. Our Christmas dinner includes beef tenderloin, mashed potatoes, and Caesar salad. Yum!
Our kids have always unfathomably slept in on Christmas morning. Whose kids are these?! Sleeping in is a totally foreign concept for me on Christmas Day. Growing up, I was always awake before everyone else—and the same holds true even now. Because the kids actually give us peace and quiet, Christmas morning always means drinking coffee with Chris in front of the tree and getting our late breakfast ready to go.
Because we are a military family, we move a lot. Some of our traditions have evolved over the years depending on where we lived at the time and our kids’ ages. Our tree has changed in size and decorations, though now it is huge and full of ornaments from all over the world. In Korea, we went to our favorite grilled mackerel restaurant on Christmas Eve. In North Carolina, we regularly attended the Unitarian Universalist congregation and spent Christmas Eve there. For several years, Santa created a scavenger hunt for the kids to find the gifts he left. Some years we have had family visit us. This made for extra fun when we lived overseas because we could share local holiday traditions with them.
Here in San Antonio, we have a great group of friends we consider family, otherwise known as our framily. We spend Christmas Eve all together playing games, eating Katie’s famous potato soup, and drinking gluhwein, a German mulled wine that we all learned to love in Germany. We often have over some of these framily members for dinner on Christmas Day. We have made Christmas our own.
And to be totally honest, we have spent two Christmases in Chicago with our family. On one of these, Chris was deployed to Iraq and I felt I needed to be around family for the holiday. We celebrated with extended family again the next year because we moved right before the holiday and did not yet have a house. Though those were festive trips, they were not my favorite Christmas celebrations. The other 16 Christmases have taken place in our own home, wherever it was. And I have loved each and every one one.
