How You Do Holidays

Wow!! It's been a while since I've been here!!!

My past weeks have been incredibly busy ... family, travel, holidays. Our son and daughter-in-law moved the weekend before Christmas ..then hosted our family festivities.... it was a little "rustic" but wonderful to be together!

How do you work the holidays at your house? Our oldest daughter has been married for 11 years and when we came to our first Christmas, the big decision was "whose year is it going to be ... with her family or his?" We hated that. Naturally, we want to be with our kids so we also understand that our son-in-law's parents want to be with their kids. I seriously hated the idea of only being with them every other year. And what about when the other kids got married ... what if the "our years" didn't coincide? Either we would end up only being with our family every other year (and being alone on the in-between years) or we would never be able to all be together on the same year. Didn't like it. Our solution? Our family gets together and includes the parents (and some siblings) for our children-in-law. It just makes sense to us. We share the most important people in the world (our kids and grandkids) -- we can certainly share our holiday.

I know that all families are not able to do this, but it's worked out great for us! We have a whole set of traditions that we enjoy as a family, and we've been absorbing traditions from our new extended families. Foods too -- you know... those "it's not Christmas unless we have ___" foods? Everyone participates. Two of our three children have married into families with values similar to ours and our religious views are very close -- that helps (our youngest child isn't married yet). It's required some flexibility on our part but really, as they've grown to adulthood, things were going to change anyway -- why not adjust to accommodate the needs of our changing family?

Other changes will come. It's inevitable. We'll cross those bridges when we get to them. But for now, it's been wonderful!!