This is our 7th Christmas as a married couple. We both come from completely different cultures and lifestyles, so our Christmas traditions couldn’t be further apart, but we’ve thoroughly enjoyed every Christmas season together.
César comes from the southern hemisphere where Christmas is in Summer. That means his Christmas was more like our Independence Day (if you can imagine!), complete with BBQs (asados), family & friends (familia y amigos), and fireworks.
If you’re from the Northern hemisphere and enjoy a white Christmas, that was basically what my Christmas was always like growing up.
© Monkey Business / Dollar Photo Club
4 Tips for Meshing Christmas Traditions
These are my best tips for meshing your traditions and still having a joyous Christmas time!
Continue the Common Traditions
The first thing you want to do as a couple is talk about both of your traditions and see if there are any overlaps. Maybe both of your families used to go caroling on Christmas Eve. Make sure to write down all traditions that you both used to do so you can include them.
As you can see, it was really hard for us to come up with any kind of similarities between our Christmas traditions. The one common tradition was spending time with family. Sure, it’s fairly broad and most people likely do that, but it was the one tradition we both desired to continue.
Compromise
If there are any differences, you might have to let go of some of your traditions of the past. It’s definitely strange to suddenly celebrate a holiday different from how you did as a child, but if you don’t compromise, you will be fighting through the season. You can’t fit everything into one holiday season.
Since our differences definitely outweighed the similarities, we were forced to let go of really great traditions we had grown up with. For the most part, it was César who had to let go of most of his. However, we agreed to keep his tradition of celebrating on Christmas Eve until late and then sleeping in on Christmas morning. In my family, we would wake up between 4 and 6 AM to see what Santa brought us, but I decided to let that one go. It was easy for me because, now that I’m an adult, I enjoy sleeping in more than rising early to open presents. Besides, Santa never brings me anything anymore! 😉
Invent a Few Traditions of Your Own
There’s nothing wrong with coming up with entirely new traditions for Christmas as a family. I think it’s great to do this to make your holidays unique. You probably will come across new ones you see on Pinterest, as well, so always be open to changing up your traditions.
Over the years, we’ve gotten rid of traditions and added new ones as we’ve learned what we both enjoy. One tradition that we’ve developed over the years is to eat like no other on Christmas. This isn’t exactly “new” to us, but it’s not exactly the same as we both did it growing up. On Christmas Day, we like to eat buffet-style all day long. We have shrimp, roast chicken with chimichurri, cornflake casserole, and all kinds of other goodies. We don’t have the traditional Christmas dinner, but we both really like the all day thing so we can just relax all day and eat as we please. It’s the one day each year we throw out all the proper eating habits. 😉
Choose to Enjoy
If you both decide to drop a few key traditions, don’t complain and moan throughout the season that you can’t do your tradition. Instead, focus on the traditions you have chosen to do as a family and learn to enjoy them. Of course, Christmas will never be exactly like how you remember it as a kid, but you are a family now that has a unique perspective on the holiday season, drawing on both of your childhood memories.
Although César has literally given up nearly every tradition he has ever known, he hasn’t complained even one bit. It has made things a whole lot easier as we’ve gone from one Christmas season to the next. Now that we have kids, it’s even more important that we agree on traditions and enjoy them so that we can pass them down.
Have you had to give up a wonderful Christmas tradition since getting married and starting a family? Any great new traditions you have started together?
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Wonderful tips Charlee!
We’ve been married for almost 8 years and we’ve tried a number of things (driving to everyone’s house on Christmas day) – which stopped when we had our second child.
We found a blend between our previous celebrations/traditions and starting some of our own holiday traditions. You’re right about compromise… it’s something both individuals (and hopefully their families) can do!
Thanks for sharing.
xoxo
Thanks so much, Jennifer! We also used to drive around on Christmas day to visit family. Now I know why we were the only ones doing it at the time! Because we (and my younger brother) were the only ones without kids!
Children changes everything! We realized that we were torturing our daughter by driving around from place to place on Christmas day.
Thanks for sharing (and for linking up to the #Christmasbloghop)!
Wishing you a lovely weekend.
xoxo
You could say that again! At least it means you can relax a bit more on Christmas, right? Thank you, Jennifer, for throwing the Christmas blog hop. What a fun virtual party! 🙂
These are great tips! We definitely had to do some compromising when we got married. Our families live four hours apart, so it makes for a bit of a stressful holiday season. My husband’s family is HUGE and they all get together multiple times. He grew up going to about 4-5 different Christmases, but I only grew up going to two. We decided as long as we made it to his mom’s and my mom’s those were the most important two. 🙂
Thank you, Chelsea! I imagine you probably spend Christmas Eve with one family and Christmas with the other, right? Wishing you a very merry Christmas 🙂
Well luckily for us, my husband’s side of the family usually gets together the weekend before Christmas, so we have Christmas Eve and Christmas day for my family. If we lived closer to my side of the family we could spend all of Christmas day at our own home, but since we live so far apart we spend the night Christmas eve and then head home Christmas day. 🙂
Loved it. Even though Kathilynn is Samoan and born in Fiji, we certainly didn’t have that big of differences between us. What I enjoy about this article Charlee, is that couples don’t realize that they could live down the street from one another–but their traditions will have differences. It doesn’t take huge cultural gaps to cause this.
My comment to this–especially on your “Invent a Few Traditions of Your Own” is to discover what made all your personal traditions special to you in the first place. Was it really about the event…or was it about the people?
Just a thought =)
Kathilynn had MANY traditions, whereas I grew up in a family where mom carried things on, but dad didn’t do much in that area…so i was, well, kinda a dude when we got married. It’s been a blast making our own, however, and we have quite a few now…which have gone with our married kids into new families as well.
Great point, Jaime. Every family celebrates in their own way, not only according to their culture. I would love to hear about the traditions your wife has brought to your family. I love that thought. Maybe it really is the people (i.e. family) that makes traditions growing up so special. Thank you for your valuable insights and thank you for visiting!
Sounds like you had a lot of Christmas traditions to mesh, but you’ve made several special traditions of your own! We graze on special foods all day on Christmas and sleep in too. I think it makes it relaxing, but my kids always want us to get up earlier. 🙂
It’s kind of fun to throw out the rules for holidays. I hope we can train the kids early on to sleep in, but I’m sure once they know more about Santa they’ll be running in and waking us up! Thanks for your visit, Marie!
Yes! One of our big battles was what to top the tree with: a star, or an angel. It’s kind of funny looking back now how adamant we were in putting our tradition on another. Finding the common traditions is great advice – as well as making new ones.
But traditions are like home, so of course you were both very stubborn about what you wanted to adorn the top of your tree each year!