I’ve mentioned this on here before, but Matt and I do Christmas a little strangely—since we typically spend Christmas Day not at home (instead, we’re down in Bountiful with our parents and siblings), we always do “our” Christmas for each other a few days before the actual holiday.
This year, our Christmas hit especially early—Saturday morning, to be exact. We admired the snow falling out the window, put on a little holiday music courtesy of Pandora, and dug into the stockings Santa had left for us.
Even though we both basically knew what we were getting (because we both wanted “big-ticket” items this year—a tablet for Matt and a Garmin GPS running watch for me), there were still a couple surprises:
Matt got me a new potato masher (hooray! my other one was the worst utensil ever created!), and I got him a shoe rack, which—I’ll admit—was more for my sanity than his.
Later that night, we did our traditional “nice” Christmas dinner with just the two of us (since our friends all seemed to be busy), which ended up working out well since the craziness of the work week had left me with literally zero motivation to do absolutely anything productive.
Usually I go all out on this dinner by making crescent rolls from scratch, whipping up a big ol’ pot of homemade mashed potatoes and gravy, and having a main dish stunner, like a large ham or pot roast. But this year, it was all I could do just to get up from playing Bejeweled on Matt’s new tablet, so our big dinner just consisted of a small roast turkey (my first time cooking one ever!), a can of green beans, some Rhodes rolls, and a little Martinelli’s sparkling cider.
Sometimes simple really is best—not only was my stress level at an all-time low that day, but both of us were perfectly satisfied and full when the meal was over.
My mom always acts so shocked every year when we tell her upon driving down that we’ve already celebrated our Christmas, but I absolutely love it—it means that Christmas day can really be focused more on family than presents, and that we don’t get that “What now?” feeling when all the gifts are unwrapped that I’ve felt sometimes during other years.
Yeah, we do things a little differently, but it works for us, and that’s what counts 🙂
Do you have any unusual Christmas traditions that people give you a hard time for?
