The holidays are upon us! Aren’t Thanksgiving and Christmas wonderful times of the year! They are family times. But wait. Once you are married, the family is bigger now.

Two families with their holiday traditions brought together by your marriage. Or maybe brought together are the wrong words. These family traditions are part of the adjustments (or challenges) you have to make early in your marriage.

How did your family celebrate the holidays? What are your family of origin traditions? How do they differ from the one you married? What were the must-have dishes at Thanksgiving? (Remember the Everybody Loves Raymond episode when Debra made fish for Thanksgiving?).

Did you always have to wait til Christmas morning to open all presents? Did everyone open their gifts at once, or did you do them one by one? Did you have brunch, or big Christmas dinner? Real tree, or fake?

How important are your traditions to you? How will you celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas in your new family? Where will you spend these holidays? Is it likely that either of your families will put pressure on you to celebrate the holidays with them? What will you do if they do? What if you don’t want to spend the holidays with either family but be alone with your husband or wife and your kids?

These are just some of the questions you’ll work through. They will challenge some couples more than others. Traditions are good. They are what helps to give us our identity as family. As time marches on, traditions will change.

Certainly, your marriage is one of those steps along the time-line of life. Your families need to understand that - hopefully they will. But of course, they are your family, just bigger now. That’s why you spend some time thinking about and planning on how you want to merge and grow your holiday traditions.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, November 18th, 2007 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Expectations, Relatives Issues, Communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.