Christmas traditions with kids who are so young can feel impossible, but with some thought and intention, we’ve tried to incorporate some of our own.
Growing up in a blended family, holiday traditions could be inconsistent. I remember a lot of consistent things — the same candies, the same order of events — but times and places were difficult to maintain year to year. Once we got married, things became even more complicated. I fault no one for that — it’s just that way when you take 30 people with 20 different schedules and throw it all into the mix.
Many times I found myself asking how in the world we might be able to implement something of our own once we had kids. It didn’t seem possible with so many places to go. But now, a few years in, we have one that was established more or less by accident.
The year our oldest daughter was born, she was 6 months old at Christmastime. Somehow it worked out that all of our out-of-town commitments concluded by lunch time on Christmas Day, so we decided to drive home that afternoon and celebrate a Christmas Night with our baby girl. It was the first time in our marriage that we’d been in our own home on December 25. “This is nice,” we said. And it was. And the stress I felt come off my shoulders is hard to describe.
The next year, 2020, our youngest daughter was only two weeks old and Covid-19 was raging. (I guess not much has changed.) We made the difficult choice to abstain from ALL holiday gatherings last year. We stayed home as a family of three for Thanksgiving and spent Christmas in the newborn haze. (It’s so hard, but man, I love the newborn time.) What I remember most about last Christmas isn’t how tired I was from middle-of-the-night feedings, but how lovely it was to wake up in my own house on Christmas Day.
We found ourselves home on the 25th for the second year in a row and we said, “Ok, this is it,” and our first Christmas tradition was born. No more traveling on Christmas Day. It kind of just fell into place, but it’s important to us to be home together in this busy phase of little babies. Perhaps this will have to change in the future, but we’re working to make it happen for now.
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