I don’t know how many other marriage blogs you read, but I follow a few of them and several of them have been talking about reconnecting with your spouse after the busyness of the holiday season is over…and that is a very valid encouragement. I hope you see this post as an encouragement to do more during the ‘regular’ part of the year, and then you don’t have to do as much ‘catching up’ when the holidays are over.

Many years ago, when our daughters were younger, we developed the Christmas tradition of having sex under/in front of the Christmas tree. It became a special time for us of connecting and slowing down in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the Christmas season. As the girls grew older and started staying up later, it became increasingly difficult to find the time to carry on with our ‘tradition’ and we missed out for several years. However, when they were away for college, we were able to rekindle this activity and it has become even more special. And now that they have both moved away (and one has moved back home again), we are finding ourselves trying to make the time between schedules of coming and going, when they are basically living in house again to visit, for our time under the tree.

I say all of this to lead up to this…there was a time in the years past when this disruption to “my schedule” would have sent me into shut-down mode. I would have closed up and started pouting. What we need to understand as males is that of all of the bodies in the house, we are likely the ones with the most flexible schedule, and when it gets disrupted, we have to mature enough that we can learn to roll with it when we can’t actually roll in it…the hay that is.