When we first get married, we are usually inclined to try and bring into our own marriage some of the traditions and activities that we have inherited from our own family experiences. This is to be expected. You can only really function from within your past experience. This may include putting up and decorating the tree on a specific day; it may include a baking frenzy exactly so many weeks before Christmas; it may include buying the turkey from the same store or farmer every year…the possibilities are endless. And it now becomes your job as a young married couple to try and combine all of these dearly held traditions into a new program for your marriage.

It could also be that you when you got married, you had to move a significant distance from both of your families in order to secure a new job or continue schooling, and this adds a whole new set of dynamics to the mix. Or worse yet, maybe you have only moved away from one of your families and the other set of parents and siblings are very close. This obviously creates a break for the spouse whose family is far away. It is also possible that you can not get far enough away from your families, or worse again, from your spouses family. There are any number of variables that can enter into and have either a positive or negative effective on your new family unit.

It is for these reasons, and probably hundreds more, that you and your wife need to sit down and have an honest conversation about what is important to you and what you can let slide. Perhaps you start this conversation by listing as many possible traditions from your own family background as you can remember. It is very possible that this creates a conversation that the both of you have never had about a very specific and vivid time in your family background. Next, you might want to start prioritizing the traditions that are most important to you as an individual, and then take the top two or three from each list and commit to making sure that those things happen in your home from this Christmas forward.

In spite of what you may be thinking, now comes probably the more difficult part, brainstorming for new and unique ideas that will become your own special traditions. Obviously, having children now or in the future will impact what you can or can not do in any given year, and you should obviously include them in some of your traditions.

One tradition that we started when the children were younger was spending a night laying on the floor in front of the Christmas tree. We would get the children to bed and then we would lay a blanket on the floor and make-believe that we were camping under the tree. As the children grew older and started staying up later, it became more difficult and had to be discontinued until they left for college, and consequently, we revived this tradition a few years ago, much to the delight of both my wife and I.

Question: What traditions have you and your wife started that are unique to your marriage apart from your respective families of origin? What traditions would you like to start?