Time to Make Your Own Christmas Traditions

So there we were on Christmas night. I’ll set the festive scene. A nearly empty Roy Rogers on the New Jersey Turnpike. Muzak “Feliz Navidad” played in the background. A man, his wife, a two year old, and a baby huddled in a back booth scarfing down stale burgers and salty fries while waiting for traffic to die down. The woman quietly hummed Christmas carols to quiet the baby as the two year old little blond girl tried hard not to fall asleep on her father, too tired to even finish her chicken nuggets. The husband and wife locked eyes in understanding and the man mouthed a promise: We are never doing this again.

And to all a good night.

That was the Archbold crew a few years ago. Looking back, that was a big moment for us. It was the moment when Christmas became our own; the moment we decided to create our own Christmas family traditions.

You see, I grew up in New York and came down to Philadelphia for college. I met my wife, got a job at a newspaper, bought a house and stayed. I guess I always felt a little guilty about moving so we started the ill-fated and much maligned three-state Christmas plan where we’d head to Mass on Christmas morning at my wife’s mother’s home in Northeast Philadelphia, open gifts, and then jump into our car and travel through New Jersey to Long Island to have Christmas dinner with my family.

The funny thing about trying to please everyone was that nobody was actually pleased. My wife’s family was upset we were leaving too soon and my family was upset that my mother asked all my brothers and sister to stay until we arrived.

For me, Christmas had always been a wonderful time but since getting married we felt like we had to bi-locate to please everyone. To me, there was Merry Christmas and then you had Married Christmas. The holiday season wasn’t going well at all. It was exhausting. It had seemed do-able when it was just my wife and I but when we had one child and then two it got…a little harder. Yeah, two babies locked in a car for hours on Christmas. Yay.

So the following year, I made the announcement to both families that we’d be spending Christmas morning at our own house and we’d go over my mother-in-law’s house for Christmas dinner and head up to New York the following day. I had dreaded telling them and put if off for a while but when I finally did there was disappointment but there was also understanding. My mother told me that she remembered when she had to make a similar decision and she told me how difficult it was.

It was a tough decision but it was the best decision I could make as a father for my children.

At some point it wasn’t about pleasing my family or her family, it was about being a family. I asked my wife about it recently and she said that while she’s glad we’re not traveling on Christmas anymore she remembered it all fondly. She remembered the woman who was working behind the counter who didn’t speak English but understood we needed warm water for the baby’s bottle. After heating the bottle slightly she dripped it on her wrist, nodded, and smiled at us.

And every year as we head up to New York on the day after Christmas, my wife points out the rest stop and hums Christmas carols and smiles.