A Life In Review

This is the first holiday season in my entire 29 years of life that I haven’t been around my family. In writing that statement, it is not lost on me just how lucky that I am. I had a pretty great childhood where we had tons of holiday traditions. While those have changed over the years, getting together for holidays has remained important.

I will be the first to admit that I have been reluctant to give up my family holidays even after I got married. Somehow it has worked out that we’ve spent almost every holiday with my side of the family. While that has been a huge blessing, now that I have kiddos, it’s more important than ever that they get to make traditions with both sides of the family. That doesn’t mean that things will be easy for me this holiday season.

I wasn’t sure how I was going to go about writing this post, but an idea came to me back in August (as I started decorating for fall). I reached out to my instagram crew and asked them for their best advice about spending holidays away from home so that I have my best chance at enjoying this season. Below you will find the top 3 tips that were shared with me, and what I am doing to make sure that both sides feel loved and celebrated (I’ve not done the best job of that in the past).

Tip #1: Include Old Traditions:

This is the one that I was already planning on doing. It will be hard because most of the old traditions were done with my family, but I will make a few of them work for us this year. Specifically Christmas morning breakfast. That is something I want to continue, regardless of who is eating with us. I love the comfort foods of home! As for Thanksgiving, my family had created a new tradition of using the leftovers to make these delicious Thanksgiving Croissants and I whole heartedly plan on keeping that tradition alive down here in the south.

Tip #2: Utilize FaceTime:

Thankfully we are in the era of the internet. Meaning that we are never too far from seeing our loved ones faces. In holidays past, FaceTime is how we shared our day with my husband’s family. This year, it’s how we will share the holiday with mine. We will also be FaceTiming on Christmas Eve specifically so that my mom can still read us the Christmas Eve traditional stories that have been part of our “night before Christmas” routine as long as I can remember.

Tip #3: Create New Traditions.

This is the tip that I received the most. It is also the one that I am really excited for. A few new traditions will be made this year. Some will be made with my husbands family. They finally have the chance to share in some traditions with their grandkids and I can’t wait to see what they will come up with. I am even more excited to see what traditions we come up with as a family just the four of us. This is the first year in our own home and the first year that Georgia is old enough to start understanding what Christmas is about. As for thanksgiving (clearly you’ve realized which holiday I prefer), I’m hoping that we can come up with a new and long lasting family tradition because after my grandparents died, my side of the family kinda lost all of our traditions and we’ve slowly been working on new ones.

I decided to keep this post short and simple, since clearly I am not an expert on this topic yet. This is a whole new world for me and I am both nervous and excited for what this holiday season holds for my little family down here in Alabama. I’ll try and come back to this post next year and add/update it with what I learn this holiday season. Do you have any other tips that I may have missed? Leave them in the comments below!