Our First Christmas

This is officially our first Christmas as a married couple. Last year, Christmas was only days before the wedding. For Christmas, my entire family had moved into “our” house--where Jesse was staying--so by default, he got included in all our celebrations.

Establishing Christmas traditions for us has been “easy” from my perspective, but I sometimes wonder what it feels like from Jesse’s perspective—he’s still too blinded by love to complain. :-)

My family’s Christmas traditions are numerous, as Christmas was probably our biggest family holiday (followed by Thanksgiving, Family Reunion, Easter, and any other excuse for a family dinner my grandmother could invent). To start off Christmas, my family piled into the truck (after Dad’s birthday on the 15th) to head out to the catalpa grove (our own land) to traipse through the rows of deciduous trees in order to compare the attributes of several dozen wild evergreens spread over a few acres with the goal of finding the “perfect” tree. Of course, for every tree we found, someone thought the tree was too short, too tall, too brown, too prickly, not symmetrical, or some other fault. Eventually, cold hands, sore feet, or boredom would win and we’d pick one. And that’s just the start! Then there was trimming the tree, decorating the house, shopping, wrapping gifts, church plays and parties, caroling, and so much more.

Jesse’s family Christmas traditions are practically non-existent--they don’t decorate the house, they don’t exchange gifts, and they aren’t attending a lot of Christmas parties.

There are moments of laughter when the differences are highlighted.
J: Mom is going to get a LOT of comments about one of her kids sending out a Christmas letter.
C: What do you mean you are not getting your family any gifts?

But for the most part, it’s easy, anytime there is room for a Christmas tradition, for me to say, “here’s what my family did--let’s do it my way,” and Jesse generally doesn’t have an alternative to suggest. But I don’t want Jesse to feel like it is a Gates Christmas that he has been tolerantly invited to join or dragged into—I want it to be OUR Christmas.

In two days, we leave for Christmas in Kansas where it will definitely be a Gates Christmas. It may be too late this year to change anything to make it more OUR Christmas, but hopefully we can write down any ideas for next year in a place where we’ll remember to review them and use them!

One of the things we are doing for the second year in a row is our tree. Not a live tree, not even a realistic looking fake tree--it's what is most often described as a Charlie Brown tree. I have some "better" pictures of the tree on my other computer, but you can see our tree in this picture.