Merging Traditions

I'm pleased to note that my household Christmas preparations and traditions are marching along this year with uncharacteristic ease. It hasn't always been so. I've been married almost ten years, and my husband and I are finally reaching a point where we don't have to argue about every little Christmas knick-knack. It's a good thing, too, because the kids are old enough to notice.

If you're lucky (as was I), your first married years are spent in a chemical froth, so you don't really mind compromising over unimportant little things like whether lights twinkle or not. After all, you're "playing house", and the whole POINT is to pretend you're a cooperative unit, rather than 2 intensely opinionated horses' rears. But then (around Christmas number three) reality sets in, and you realize that you ARE, in fact, just that.

I'm sure the details differ from family to family. The first major issue for us was "When to get the tree". Thanksgiving, or Christmas Eve?

Differing opinions on the pros and cons of LIVE trees is probably the primary reason that the birth rate routinely drops in late September. When I was a kid, not only had I never SEEN an artificial Christmas tree, I had no idea that there were VARIETIES of live ones. Christmas tree: Douglas Fir. Period. There is simply NO easy compromise here, unless you trade off victories, meaning that whoever wins on the tree issue gets to climb the 2^nd story eaves to hang lights. Then go back up and re-do them on account of you can't just replace a burnt bulb with ANY color - it has to be the same as the burnt-out one!

Our difficulties continued in short order with a war over tinsel. I won't point any fingers, but SOMEBODY'S Mother, apparently, was a tinsel fanatic. And despite the fact that it's incredibly tacky and kills cats (which might to some miscreants be considered a perk), that somebody doesn't care to see reason.

Front yard decorations are another touchy point, and may actually be responsible for a large percentage of divorces. Not necessarily because of disagreements, but because a husband, on his way home from work, may pass by his home many times without recognizing it - and get accused of all sorts of terrible dalliances.

I might argue that the little ceramic houses we line up on the mantle needn't NECESSARILY be in the same configuration every year (arranged alphabetically). But in my house, I'd be wrong. Which isn't an incredible leap, since (among other things) I'd just assumed that EVERYBODY had a 4 foot corrugated cardboard Santa…

My husband might think that bleached sea urchin carcasses look a little silly hanging from a tree, but he's wise enough to keep it to himself. He once dissed my angel flag (I was 8 months pregnant at the time, which means he was pretty much toast.)

I was puzzled, for years, about his adoration of poinsettias - a plant I had no particular feelings for one way or other. I mean, how many of those things do you NEED, anyway? But he kept bringing them home, two by two. Eventually I warmed up to them. And that, I think, was the turning point.

So many years we spent squandering tidbits of Christmas joy in a desperate attempt to hang on to the traditions we thought held the secret. Two exacting personalities, at odds over the likes of a Santa mug or paper chain. What we never saw, never even suspected, was our own parents' consternation, ironing out their own holiday differences for our benefit. Setting us up for disaster by having cleverly found middle ground before we caught on that there might, just possibly, be more than one RIGHT way.

Maybe, after all, that's the whole POINT of mistletoe.