Christmas with the Habs.

First off, a very Merry Christmas Eve to all of you, my friends! Wherever you are, whatever your holiday tradition(s), I hope you are safe and well.

Today, I thought I’d dedicate my post to our developing Christmas traditions. When a couple chooses to intertwine their lives together forever, one of the decisions they have to tackle (and sometimes doesn’t occur to them to tackle it) is holiday traditions. This is particularly true for couples whose families live in two different states or at opposite ends of a state where traveling in a single day is impossible. Hurt feelings, disappointment, and resentment are common during this period of negotiation.

But Robert and I are among the lucky ones. Our sets of parents approach the holidays from a much more realistic point of view. In addition to the typical holiday trade-off, our parents make our lives a lot easier on us because they are not fixated on a specific date. Celebrate Christmas on the 18th instead of the 25th? No biggie. See each other on the weekend before or after Thanksgiving? Lookin’ forward to it! The way Robert and I handle our holidays is simple: each year, we split Thanksgiving and Christmas between the families and then alternate the next year. So, for instance, we’ll celebrate Thanksgiving with his family and Christmas with my family one year, and then Thanksgiving with my family and Christmas with his the next year. 2009 and 2010 have been the exception to the rule simply because we had to also get on a college football schedule. You see, college football is exceptionally important to our families, and starting in 2009, the powers that decide these things decided that our biggest rivalry would be played on Black Friday. Black Friday is also an exceptionally important day to my mom and me, and I was desperately disappointed last year when we hosted the big game and had to forego shopping. Because it was my family’s turn for Thanksgiving, we had to hightail it from one state to the other in time for the game. That was terrible. We realized then that we had to get on course properly. This year, the game was hosted by our rivals, so we decided that we’d double-up Thanksgiving so that we could get on track with our beloved team.

In all the Thanksgivings we’ve had together (3), I’ve only spent one of them with Robert’s family…and the same can be said of him for celebrating Christmas day with my family. We are seriously lucky that our families are understanding and patient with us as we figure all of this out.

So this year, we’re celebrating Christmas with the Habs! The Hab. tradition is as follows:
Christmas Eve: go for dinner at Robert’s paternal grandmother’s house; they don’t eat the “traditional” Southern holiday fare, which is nice because it’s a different set of food from what we’ll eat on Christmas day. Because she loves her grandson, Robert’s grandmother makes his favorite side dish: dirty rice. Sooo good! I look forward to that for the entire two hour drive up to her house. After dinner, we open gifts and have dessert. His family takes this time to reminisce on their favorite holiday memories; I love hearing these stories.
Christmas Day: we wake up on Christmas day in our own bed, having driven home the night before. After taking our time a little bit, we head over to Robert’s parents’ house for breakfast (they live just down the street from us). His mom makes delicious breakfast foods, we open presents, and then get ready for dinner. His dad makes the turkey, and we eat at his maternal grandma’s house (who lives in the same area). This year is particularly exciting because Robert’s aunt, uncle, and two cousins will be with us.

The traditions may not be fancy or out of the ordinary, but they don’t have to be those things in order to be special.

I hope all of you are able to take these few days to enjoy your already established traditions or to enjoy new ones you’re making.

Merry Christmas! 🙂