One of the scary, but cool things about marriage that no one tells you about is that you start your own Christmas family traditions. For someone who doesn't have any holiday traditions to bring to the table, though, you have to start from scratch.
I've always had my own personal "activities" I do every December, such as watching "A Christmas Story" during the 24-hour marathon on TV starting Christmas Eve until it stops being funny (which is never), and hitting up the mall to do last-minute shopping with one of my oldest and dearest friends.
My family, however, never decorated sugar cookies and we stopped putting up the tree sometime when I was in middle school. The one thing that was constant was everyone — me, my mom, brother, aunts, uncle, cousins and grandma — getting together Christmas day to eat. Even that's changed over the years with my brother getting married and then my grandmother passing away this summer. Then there's been the factor of making time to visit my in-laws. With so much in flux, which is part of growing up, I guess, I've relied heavily on my husband, Chris, to make our own Gallo family traditions. That's easier said than done.
All I had to reference were TV, movies and stories my friends told about chopping down an evergreen for their perfect Christmas tree and listening to holiday music while baking perfect sugar cookies as a family that were then perfectly decorated. It was all so … perfect.
Our first year as husband and wife, Chris and I were living in an apartment and didn't have room for a tree. The stockings sadly hung from hooks on a wall. Last year, we hit a deer (it wasn't one of Santa's, I swear) driving home from my in-laws in Pennsylvania on Christmas Eve. Then my mom got sick with the flu and stayed home that day. We also have this bad habit of getting too excited for the presents we've bought each other, and by the time the big day rolls around most of the gifts have already been opened. Makes for a pretty lame Christmas morning.
This year is going much better. We have a legitimate (fake) tree adorned with ornaments I've been collecting over the years in anticipation of finally having one, we've been baking cookies every weekend for friends and co-workers and we've been able to abstain from opening any presents. Plus, we'll actually get to see my smarty-pants sister-in-law who's attending college in England, a present in and of itself.
It seems when I stopped putting so much importance on a "perfect" Christmas season and upholding holiday traditions that Chris and I were able to actually figure out what all we wanted to do and what things our little family could repeat in years to come — minus the deer incident.
When kids come into the picture way, way down the road, I'm sure things will change once again. It will get even more complicated and they'll probably inherit their parents' eagerness to open presents. What I look forward to, though, is passing on the traditions that Chris and I have started and will continue to create in the coming years. Hopefully they won't mind watching "A Christmas Story" for hours and hours.