Once you say “I do” the world you know changes. Not in a way that makes it FEEL different, but in a way that both you and your husband/wife KNOW that it is different. My husband and I had to go through the Greek Orthodox version of pre cana. Here it was impressed upon us that once we are married we become our own family. That although we both come from separate families, and both love those families, that we now must put our own family first. I think although we want to think that this is easy, that we always will put each other first, it is definitely sometimes hard. One of the ways it is difficult is family traditions. How do we, as husband and wife, make our own family traditions with out losing the family traditions we love?
I live a bit of a distance from my family. This is hard. I also live extremely close to my husbands family, and although it’s great to have family close by, I find myself jealous of the fact that we get to participate in their family traditions more than we get to celebrate with my family’s traditions. So far in our first year of marriage I think we accomplished our holiday schedule very well, and we both did a little give and take….but throughout this year, I don’t think we found any tradtions that were “OURS”.
I hear from others that once children are involved traditions will change and mold to be what’s best for you. This makes perfect sense, but how do we make it work for us as well as both of our families? I’m sure this is a problem most newlyweds face. Especially ones who are both close to their families. Maybe the idea is to think outside the box. Traditions don’t have to be only about holidays. So here are a few ideas that I have about what could be considered, or may be considered tradition in the future.
- Anniversaries: For the past 8 years my husband and I have always took time out to celebrate our anniversary. First we celebrated the anniversary of when we started dating. Then we celebrated the anniversary of the day we got engaged (which is Valentine’s day so he got off easy on that one) and now we look forward to celebrating our wedding anniversary. This year we are taking a small trip to Newport Rhode Island, and I hope that in the years to come we continue to celebrate our anniversary.
- Birthdays: Every year on each of our birthdays my husband and I take each other out to dinner. This is a day that we get to choose to eat wherever we want. Because I am the picky eater my husband normally gets jipped on where we go to out to eat…so on his birthday he always takes advantage and takes me out to his favorite restaurant which is in Manhattan. It’s called Shabu Tatsu and it’s Japanese food…I personally don’t like it, but hey it’s his birthday!
OK…so it’s not much but it’s something. A start! I guess we have years and years ahead of us to create our family traditions. It’s all just a part of the journey of marriage.
So what are some of your family traditions? Maybe I could steal some and make them ours!
My family lives in the Bronx, not exactly PA but we don’t see them all too often.
Over the years most holidays I spent with Matt’s family because my family couldn’t get it together. When we moved to Plainview I decided that needed to stop. Thanksgiving is spent with the in-laws, my sister spends it with her in-laws, my brothers watch football with my dad and my mom does whatever. I started doing a post Family Thanksgiving dinner on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Everyone comes over and it is relaxed and fun. My family comes, Matt’s parents & sister come over and we invite a set of our really close friends. I cook up a huge traditional dinner with some Latin food thrown in. It is a great compromise for us and it feels extra special because it sort of like we have our own day of celebration.
Matt is Jewish but his family is mixed so we do celebrate Christmas. We have a tree trimming night for ourselves. It is wonderful to just spend the night together, music playing, food, wine, hot chocolate for the kid, decorating the tree. Just us. Every year we go out ahead of time and try to pick out that one perfect ornament for one another. Each year we reminisce of times past and share stories with Leah of our Christmases as kids growing up. We look at the older ornaments and so forth.
For Christmas we have the families over for a Christmas Eve Open House.
My family celebrates Three Kings Day so we do that with Leah. More me than Matt. Put hay in a shoe box and leave for water and in the morning there are gifts from the Three Kings left for her.
Chanukah is Matt and Leah mostly. They light the menorah together every night, I tell Leah the story of Chanukah.
We have sort of started a movie night as a family. Usually Friday night. Nice to come home, unwind, dinner, popcorn and movie at home.
We make sure to have dinner at the dining table every night. Seems like a common tradition and not a big deal for some families. But it is sooooo easy to just prop up and eat in front of the tv. I find that eating a meal together lends something special to our relationships as a family. Leah knows it is her time to tell us about her day. She knows it is family time and no one is going anywhere.
Hopefully over the years we can come up with some traditions that aren’t totally holiday related.
Sol those sound like some amazing traditions! I LOVE the one about buying eachother the perfect ornament. Christmas is such a special time for me, and since we spend Christmas at my parents house, it would be nice to have a pre christmas tradition of our own.
A gathering on Saturday for Thanksgiving sounds nice. Last year I wanted to get all of our friends together for our own Thanksgiving dinner like a week before Thanksgiving..maybe I’ll do that this year. You’ve motivated me!
Evan and I eat dinner together almost every night, but I must admit most of the time it’s in front of the TV! When we first got our table I made sure we sat there..but it kind of went away. My family always ate dinner at the table together for dinner and I want to continue that when we extend our family.
We have had a hard time with this, too! I blogged about it this week actually, lol. We tried to create a Christmas Eve dinner tradition, and that fell flat on its face :-p
I think we have very similar situations actually! I live with my husband about 45 minutes from his mum and 3-4 hours from my family. We make a big deal of our anniversary (we had a weekend in Brussels last year) and we take each other for birthday dinners. Other traditions? We make a conscious effort to do at least one thing per day just to be nice to the other person, and we say ‘I love you’ every day (usually several times!). I may think of more….
I think that’s great! I try to tell The Captain I love him every day! It’s always nice to hear! Congrats on getting married!