This year, I’ll have a whole new kind of Christmas.
I’m going to visit my husband’s family in Michigan, and it will be the first Christmas I’ve spent away from my family. I already miss them, but I’m trying to stay positive and think about how interesting it will be to experience what my husband’s family’s holidays are like.
For instance: there will be snow. Lots of snow. This will be the first white Christmas I’ve ever experienced (growing up in San Jose, it never got cold enough). The truth is, I don’t really love snow. It looks pretty out the window, but when I go outside, I just want it to go away.
When I look at pictures of freshly fallen snow, all I can think about is how cold it must be. When I was in high school, I even refused to apply to certain colleges when I saw pictures of how much snow they got in the winter! So I’m kind of dreading that part, but I’m trying to stay positive.
My husband found a place to rent cross-country skis, and I’m looking forward to trying that—that’s something you certainly can’t do in San Jose.
My husband has a lot of brothers and sisters. There are so many that I haven’t even met all of them! But they are all much older than he is, and have their own homes and families, so they won’t be there to celebrate Christmas morning with us, because they’ll be with their own kids.
It will just be my husband, his mom, and me (my father-in-law is in a nursing home—we’ll go see him later.)
I only have two brothers, but at Christmas, my brothers and I all converge on our parents’ house and act loud and boisterous, like we did when we were kids. A small, quiet Christmas will be a serious adjustment.
This struggle to understand and deal with traditions other than your own is at the heart of the fifth book in the Home to Heather Creek series, which is called A Patchwork Christmas. This story follows the Stevenson family through their first Christmas together.
In many ways, the book is about the kids learning to understand a whole new way of celebrating. It’s their first Christmas without their mother, and they experience things that have never been a part of their holiday traditions, such as Christmas pageants, and homemade winter treats, and—yes—snow.
Ultimately, it’s also about the love that binds this patched-together family together at this special time of year. It’s a beautiful story, and a perfect holiday read, but it’s also been a good reminder to me that sometimes new traditions can be the best of all.
