We all love the holidays! No matter what we celebrate, we embrace traditions and let them take over our lives. What we should do is overruled by what we are expected to do – can you put yourself into the RIGHT category? My guess is that most everyone struggles to find what is right for them. For us, we celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas, not for religious reasons, but with mixed marriages throughout the entire family. We have embraced our own traditions. We mix our traditional foods from all sides of the family and we all enjoy this completely. Since our children were born, this is the “new” family tradition.
In comparison to what others do, when someone is so very ill they cannot keep it up. Sometimes family members do not understand and we welcome them to “take over if they would like” to keep things similar if they need to do this, or everyone understand that, we need to communicate with the family, especially children, that things may not be up to par from years past. They need to understand, like everyone should, that it is not about the food, the gifts, or who cooks what; it is all about being together. Time is the gift here. Everything else should fall into place. Order pizza instead of making a full dinner, create homemade gifts if money is tight, or scale down the holidays decorations! It is all not important unless we share our love and support.
It’s ironic that I’m reverting back to all of these suggestions this year. Since being struck by the hurricane, having a sick father, and a brother in law having surgery the week prior, we have made the decision to scale down. Although we are doing dinner on Christmas at our rental home, it is a much smaller group, less stress for us since we are dealing with so much. We do not have a big tree and lots of gifts. Small and special is what it will be! Those who traveled very far and want to stay over cannot this year; it is just too much for us. Those living closer are all chipping in and bringing something. I bet this holiday will be great except for my dad not able to attend. So we are going to him to celebrate on his birthday!!!!! We are making it all work. We did this very similar thing when I was a child and very ill. We were together, that was most important!
