My husband and I have faced a dilemma this year that caught
us completely off guard. I am sure this
is not a new issue out there and many young families face it every year. How do you combine your individual family
Christmas traditions to make your own family traditions?
Our son is two and half, but this is his first Christmas
home (which I had to fight for but I will get to that later). The last two Christmases we were traveling;
the first to the US to visit my family and last years his whole family did
Christmas in Fiji. They we fun and glorious
but never made us think about how we wanted our Christmas to go down.
So it all began about two months ago when we started making
our plans for Christmas. I made the
argument that we should be home this year and let our son wake up in his own
bed and have Santa visit him in his own house.
But, for my husband, it was always Christmas Eve at Nan’s house for
presents and then Santa comes the next morning, with the family having a big
Christmas lunch later in the day. Now I
might mention that Nan’s house is five hours away and this little lady has to
work Christmas Eve. I put my “foot down”
on the whole Christmas Eve deal and “we”
decided that it did not make sense for us to rush off to Nan’s after I got out
of work on Christmas Eve. I was pleased
that our son would have Christmas morning in his own bed and we would not be
fighting the ungodly Christmas Eve traffic.
Being the slightly comprising women that I am, I agreed that
we would make it up to Nan’s for Christmas dinner and not rush our
morning. At this point now with
Christmas only two days away it has gone from Christmas dinner to an early
Christmas dinner at 4pm to “oh surely we can make it there by 3pm to open
presents before Christmas dinner”. I
could slowly see our relaxed Christmas morning turning into a hurried opening
up of presents just to jump straight in the car to make it to Nan’s on time. I put the hard word on my husband to tell his
family we will get there when we get there and we are not going to rush to ruin
this Christmas morning for our son.
Luckily my husband didn’t put up much of a fight and we kept it at a 4pm
dinner at Nan’s. All our Christmas
issues solved or so I thought.
It continued on about two weeks ago with the pulling out of
the Christmas decorations. I started
hanging stockings and my husband looked at me with an odd look and said “why do
we have stockings?”
“Um hello for Santa to fill” I responded.
Then we got into a debate about where Santa’s
gifts would go. In my family it was
always Santa filled the stockings and then left a couple of cool presents under
the tree with everyone else’s presents.
For my husband, Santa left a Santa Sack full of presents under the
tree. This explains his massive stocking
that was hanging on the mantel. I argued
half the fun is ripping off all the wrapping paper from the Santa presents
under the tree, plus you get your stocking before breakfast to keep you
busy. The look of horror on his face
when I mention this made me take a step back.
Clearly we have different ideas on Christmas morning.
Growing up in his house hold it was a free for with kids
pulling everything out of Santa Sacks and breakfast was secondary. We were a little more civilised in my house
hold in which we only opened our stocking and then sat down to a special breakfast,
once finished we would all gather around the Christmas tree opening presents
one at a time.
Through much debate we agreed on: a stocking/Santa Sack
combo to open before breakfast, followed by a nice breakfast and then some
presents wrapped under the tree from Santa and us.
Through our whole relationship my husband and I have battled
certain cultural barriers. I mean they
are not huge barriers, I’m American and he is Australian. But we have always handled them with grace,
understanding and an eagerness to learn where the other one is coming
from. However these personal, family
traditions that we both hold so sacred have really thrown us off our game. It is odd to think that we both went to these
discussions thinking that our traditions were the norm and how dare the other
suggest something different.
Anyways we have the plan for this year, who knows what will happen
next year when baby #2 is with us.
