That Holiday Spirit

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The topic for Mystery Topic Challenge #5:
What are your favorite holiday traditions and why?

This has been a rather tough topic for me. Not so much as thinking about holiday traditions but on what exactly to write.

As a child my family didn't really celebrate Christmas. They are fairly religious people and felt that the reason for the holiday had been corrupted by the commercialism. So, besides maybe getting a present at school from a secret Santa type of exchange, I typically didn't really get anything for Christmas. And I didn't really notice much of any difference between myself and other kids.

That changed once my Mother married her first husband. His family celebrated Christmas and my mother didn't really think it very fair for his children to get all the Christmas goodies and do all the celebrations and such and us not being included. So, we had Christmas, but I was old enough to know better at that point and much of the mystery was never there.

Once I was on my own, I didn't really bother to celebrate Christmas. There was no one, except family that didn't really celebrate at this point, for me to buy gifts for anyway. I didn't bother decorating a tree or putting up any other sort of decorations as that didn't really seem all that important, anyway. Especially if you are a single guy and struggling to make rent and pay the bills. Spending money on Christmas decorations is usually about the last thing you are likely to budget into monthly expenses.

Everything changed again when I married my wife. She is a huge fan of Christmas and has always celebrated. She has lot of little traditions that she has wanted to get started. We've only experienced the one Christmas, though, so far. And although we were able to purchase a lot of decorations for the house and a cool tree and such, we couldn't really afford everything that she wanted to get for Christmas. Also, we live in an apartment complex that doesn't allow exterior decorations, so much of what she has wanted hasn't really been possible, either.

This year things have been so hectic for us that we haven't even had the chance to put up any of our Christmas decorations, yet. We'll hopefully fix that today, but she and I both work full-time jobs and so having time for just about anything other than working, fixing dinner and spending a few short hours with each other has been really difficult as of late.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't really have a favorite holiday tradition...yet. A few things have to fall in place for us as a family, just yet, before we can be settled enough to really work on the traditions. We need a house of our own that we can decorate as we please. We need a few more years to really establish what our traditions actually are, too. I'm really happy that we are building these traditions together, though, so it's just a matter of time before I could really answer this question to the fullest.

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