Choosing My Course: Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to all of my readers out there who celebrate the holiday! We're enjoying a quiet, nuclear family holiday this year. My kids are both playing on electronics right now, and my husband is cooking our Christmas goose. We've never had goose before, but my husband loves to try cooking traditional items so we're going to give it a shot. He's also made Christmas pudding in the past, which was good but too rich for most of us. The biggest success has been sugar plums. We all love those and they're practically health food with all the nuts and dried fruit so he makes those every year.

Evolution of the Celebration
My parents moved to Colorado when I was 9 months old (so I'm not an actual native, but pretty darn close). Christmas for me growing up was always just the four of us (my parents, my brother, and me) and we always spent time relaxing and reading our new books.

My husband always lived near all of his family, so Christmas Eve was always with his mother's Italian parents celebrating the Feast of the Seven Fishes. Christmas day was always with his dad's parents, and when they lived in the area, his dad's sister's family.

After we first got married and had children, we continued to celebrate Christmas Eve each year with my husband's maternal grandparents. Before they had to quit hosting it, the event got pretty huge with all the grandchildren married and with kids of their own. My mother-in-law took over the event several years ago, and we actually broke into two celebrations with my husband's cousins starting their own.

Every Christmas day we'd go and see my parents and my husband's family. I finally put a stop to this one year when my brother-in-law was hosting Christmas and took his time with the meal so we didn't eat lunch until almost 4:00 in the afternoon, and I was practically screaming at my children to open their gifts faster after the meal since we were supposed to be at my parent's house at 5:00.

After that infamous year, we starting celebrating with only one family on Christmas, and the other family the weekend after, alternating years. Then my brother-in-law converted to Messianic Judaism a few years ago and stopped celebrating most holidays. They don't celebrate Hanukkah either, only the Jewish festivals found in the old testament. Once that change happened, we stopped seeing my husband's family on Christmas day and always see them the weekend after to celebrate with his paternal grandparents.

Since my brother and his wife still alternate Christmas celebrations with our family and his wife's family, that left Christmas every year other open with no family commitments or celebrations. My husband wasn't sure how he felt about that since he'd never celebrated Christmas that way, but I convinced him to give it a shot because that was how I had always celebrated it growing up. I think he was very skeptical about it until we tried it, and now I think even he enjoys the restful Christmas day every other year.