New Holiday Traditions

Now that we're past Halloween and building into the full swing of the impending Holiday season, I find that my mood is changing.  I'm one of those sappy people who has always loved the holidays.  I love everything about them.  I love the baking, the family dinners, the decorations, the shopping, the gift wrapping, the holiday movies, the anticipation of Christmas morning, the holiday songs, the general sense of goodwill that people have for those few short weeks in November and December.  I'm a sap and I love all of it.  Part of this stems from when I was little and the holidays were the only time that I got to see certain family members because everyone was always so busy.  It was when I got to see aunts and uncles I hadn't seen in a long time, or got to play with some of my cousins that I didn't see often.  It was the time of year where I could follow my older cousins around like a lost puppy, desperately hoping for their approval because they were so much older and cooler than I was.  In a family that was sometimes distant, or fractured, the holidays were the time that we would all get together and pretend the problems didn't exist.

In recent years, holidays have become more difficult.  We split each holiday between my family and Jason's, and coordinating everyone is difficult.  Plus there's an issue with everyone being at different houses and arguing over who should host, or who should cook, and in the long run it becomes more stressful than it needs to be.  If we throw in any friends from out of town, it's a full blown nightmare.  In the end, it makes me kind of sad.  I'm not sure why everyone has to have their own agenda during the holidays, and why it's about what one person wants as opposed to what the group as a whole wants, and the past few years have left me frustrated by the time we hit Black Friday.  This year, however, feels different.  This year in addition to our traditional families, we get to celebrate with our own quirky little family of hodge podge members.  It's no secret that we don't currently have children, aside from our psudo-child teenager who we care about as if she were our own, so I've never experienced that small unit family togetherness that parents feel.  We are in no way replacement parents for her, but through her we do get to have that experience for the first time this year.  One more person to go along when we pick out the tree, one more person to help decorate, one more person to enjoy presents with on Christmas morning.  Plus, we've inherited her boyfriend, who has become a part of our strange family unit, and a graduate from the theatre program who we have kind of adopted as "cool niece".  All of these new and wonderful people in our lives seem to make the squabbling matter less.  Regardless of who does or doesn't want to host dinner, or whose house we end up at, we will come home to our cozy house with our weird little family, drink hot chocolate, and have a lovely holiday.  The rest of the world's problems don't matter when you can close the door and love where you are.  We'll be in our kitchen, creating new traditions.  This Christmas will be filled with cookies, cocoa, pine scent, twinkling lights and love.  I'm not sure what more I could want.