Christmas Traditions

I will be the first to admit that I was having trouble getting in the Christmas spirit this year. When I saw Jessica's post about Christmas traditions I was a little intimidated. Every year Christmas looks a little different to us, some years I'm on call, spending the day at the hospital, other years we travel to Tulsa. I sat there wracking my brain... what can I write about? When am I going to have time to write? We don't do anything extra special at our house, just the 'normal Christmas stuff': cut down the tree, decorate it, make cookies, etc. However, slowly over the past few weeks as our family has gone through our Christmas routine my Christmas spirit has started to grow.

We usually cut down our own tree, but with the baby toddling everywhere we elected to put up a fake tree upstairs where he couldn't get into it. I'm partially to blame for this for this initial "Scrooge-ness". I am a hard-core real tree fan, the smell can't be imitated. I also realized that keeping a 1 year old out of the tree was going to be quite challenging, so I caved and went for the fake one this year.

When we set up our tree, Ryan helped me decorate it. This was so much fun. He is six now and our tree is full of decorations that he has made in various art classes over the years. He was so proud of his past ornaments and I began to tell him the stories behind many of our other ornaments. One of our holiday traditions is to pick an ornament each year that embodies something special about that year. As we went through the box of ornaments it was like a trip through time.

There was the baseball ornament with chief wahoo on it (Go Tribe!) from the years we lived in Akron. The skiing Santa from the year we went skiing for Christmas. There's an ornament from Puerto Rico which was our 'Cruising Christmas' (one of my favorites).

At the bottom of the box was my favorite ornament of all: The pregnant snowman (snow woman?). This was the Christmas of 2004, when I was 8 months pregnant with Ryan. My eyes brimmed with tears as I told Ran about this ornament, what an exciting Christmas this was for us as we patiently awaited his birth. He got so tickled as I told him about how we didn't know if he was a boy or girl and how much we loved him even before we saw him or knew him. I recounted the story of his birth, how he decided to come a few days early, even though all his grandparents had already bought their plane tickets. How much he meant to us.

He and I finished with the tree. He sat on my lap and rested his head on my shoulder. "Mom, the tree is so beautiful".

"Yes, honey it is."

I thought about my family, how much they mean to me. I wondered how many more Christmases until he was too big (or thought he was too big) to sit on my lap. I enjoyed every minute of it.

Then I unpacked the stockings. Carson's "faith" stocking was on top. We bought his stocking blank, many years before God brought him to our family. The same joy I felt last year when I hung it for the first time was rekindled in my heart.

Though our traditions are not overly unique, they are ours. Even though our Christmas 'days' often look different each year, we embraced the traditions leading up to it, realizing that family is the most important tradition of all.