Making Christmas Traditions

France and America have some big differences when it comes to the Christmas season. The one I think of in November is that there is no Thanksgiving holiday to provide a buffer between Halloween and Christmas. Though the French don’t typically start singing their Christmas carols in early November, they also don’t have any reason to wait until December to put up their Christmas decorations and encourage the holiday shopping season to start. So for us, the Christmas season has been building up for a while. But now, with just a few more days until Christmas Day, it really does feel like Christmas.

Since we are doing a smaller Christmas at home this year, just the four of us, my wife pointed out the importance of making Christmas special. I’m very happy that she wants to make this Christmas special, as Christmas is not really a big celebration back in China, so I wasn’t raelly expecting her to go all out. But she pointed out that it is important for our children to have good memories of Christmas, and for us to make Christmas special with some traditions just for us. I think that she also wants to make Christmas an enjoyable time for me, and has already proposed a big turkey dinner, with lots of stuff to eat on the side. Though I will probably need to prepare my holidays sweatpants for the aftermath, I am grateful to have a wife who is willing to put a lot of effort into making this holiday special for all of us.

I have contributed a bit as well by bringing a Christmas tree back from our local grocery store parking lot. This is not as small a thing as it may seem since I had to bring it back on the bicycle trailer. The trees become available at the beginning of December, and though I try to wait awhile before getting ours, I’m always concerned about being left with few good options, as there is a limited selection and some are much more expensive than others. So I got the tree almost three weeks before Christmas, and it has been shedding pine needles in the corner of our living room ever since. Well, ever since I cut the top foot off of it, because I can never remember how tall our living room ceiling is when I’m buying Christmas trees, and I figure that bigger is better.

And underneath our tree, the presents have been steadily multiplying. It seems that every year, I think that we’ll just have a few gifts to give out and that will be fine. After all, our children are young and we don’t need a lot of gifts to enjoy the holidays. And every year, a few gifts quickly turns into enough to fill up all the space underneath the tree. We start out with a few things that we picked up, usually toys for the kids. Pretty soon, we start getting packages in the mail every other day, and if the gifts aren’t labeled, we have a hard time keeping track of which is from whom, as we have so many. We’re blessed to have family that takes the extra effort to send gifts from overseas. That takes more time and planning, and is more of an expense.

I haven’t got a concrete plan for starting a big events, but the great thing is that we are all together for the next week. School is out for two full weeks, and I’m off work for one full week. That leaves us plenty of time to hang out together and enjoy the season. We may not have a White Christmas, but on most days we have a wonderful fire going in our fireplace. My wife spent a little extra to put some basic ornaments on the tree, and of course our daughter Miriam never gets tired of making drawings to decorate the tree.

Great traditions are often just activities that come naturally, like playing games in the house with the kids. The big planned outings and events are fun too, but they kind of are expected to be. The memories that I enjoy the most are the unexpected joys of laughing and spending time with family members, often doing nothing more than talking. Those are the types of memories that we will hopefully be making as we spend time together this Christmas, just the four of us.