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Holidays and Family

Holidays can be challenging.  I don't really have to tell anyone that.  You get family together celebrate.  Some people show up that you hoped wouldn't, others don't show that you wanted to.  Holidays are filled with memories.  Memories of celebrating with family that may not be around anymore.  Add all the cooking, travel and everything else and its just always so much fun.  Thanksgiving was a holiday I intentionally choose not to travel for.  Especially living in DC.  The place become a ghost town.  With Thanksgiving on a set day, travel become predictable and expensive.  So for the past 13 years of living here, I gladly spent the day with friends.  Until I started dating someone who would become my future husband.  Talk about adding a new level of stress to the holidays.  Hardest part is figuring out how to share the holidays.  You come up with some notional  schedule that neither side is truly happy about but agrees to as a middle ground. Because thats what you do when you are in a relationship, compromise.  Said compromised holiday finally rolls around and you travel to go see your new extended family. You learn all kinds of ways families do things differently.  Different foods, different schedules, different ways of communicating, different traditions.  You wonder if your family is weird or this newly acquired family is weird.  It has to be the new family.  But you miss yours.  You call to see how their Thanksgiving is going and that makes you miss them more.  And that family that drove you crazy when they show up to Thanksgiving dinner even though you really didn't want to talk to them, you miss them.

There isn't a great way to handle it.  I can tell you that talking to that person that got you wrapped up in all this nonsense helps but it doesn't make you stop missing your family.  As I write this, at 3 am in the kitchen of my in-laws because I have just gotten up to eat at my normal hour, I think about the next stage of our lives.  Especially since that is what causes me to wake up in the middle of the night and decide I need to eat.  I look forward to creating our own holiday traditions. I'm not really sure what that looks like.  I'm sure there will be compromise involved.  But as with all of our marriage, its a chance to write a new chapter all our own.

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