Christmas for Newleyweds

This was our first Christmas as a married couple.  It was so much fun to be able to call Eric my husband on such an important holiday.  It was the first year we both got to participate in the holiday traditions with each other's families.  While it was very hectic, it was also amazing.  


Our holidays started off with baking cookies with my family.  This was the first time Eric got to help us make our millions of cookies.  We made butter cookies, boiled cookies, Hungarian butterhorns, chocolate chip cookies, sugar cookies, reeses cookies, Hershey kiss cookies, snowballs, nutbread, and I think that might be it.  It was very eventful.  He got to watch the SPECIAL way our family makes Christmas cookies...nothing odd about our tradition, we just don't let outsiders watch for good reason.  We didn't get a picture of us actually making the cookies, but here is some of the artwork.

We had to wait until Christmas Eve to eat the cookies, but it was worth it.  Christmas Eve luckily started out bright and early at 8 in the morning.  We got to my parents and got to eat all our goodies.  We then exchanged gifts with the family.  It was a full house this year with many significant others being present.  Yet somehow the 4-5 hour usual gift exchange was only 3 hours.  Not sure how that happened.  It was a lot of fun.  We changed up the order we handed out gifts this year by drawing names out of a hat.  It added another element of surprise to our celebration.  Sadly Eric and I had to give out our gifts last, but I guess they saved the best for last so it was worth it.  :)  There were lots of laughs, lots of AMAZING gifts, and lots of surprised reactions.  

After the gift exchange with our family, we watched Sherlock Holmes, looked at some wedding pictures, then took a nap.  We then got dressed a little more formally and headed to Eric's family's house for their Christmas.  His family does things a little differently.  They don't hand out the presents one at a time and have everyone open one at a time.  Usually, as Eric explained it to me, it's just pure madness.  However, after I explained how my family did it, his family actually decided to change it up a little bit this year.  They decided to hand out the presents to each person and have only one person open all their presents while everyone watched.  I liked it a lot and his family even said they liked it that way.  They enjoyed being able to actually watch everyone's faces as they opened each gift.  I thought it was really sweet that his family took a little of my family tradition into their holiday.


After his family's Christmas, we headed back to my parent's house to get ready for Mass.  This was our first time going to Midnight Mass so we were not sure what to expect.  It ended up being really relaxing and nice.  We were not as tired as we thought we would be.


After Mass we headed BACK to my parent's house where we stayed the night.  It felt so weird to be spending the night with a man in my parent's house.  I honestly felt like I was going to get in trouble and kicked out.  It was very strange and my parents were laughing at me and my hesitation to sleep with my husband under their roof.  I managed to talk my self out of my crazy scenario and let myself try to fall asleep.  After sleeping about three hours we woke up at 5:40 to do Christmas AGAIN.  We went into my sisters room where we all hung out until my parents said it was time to go downstairs.  Then, just like every year, we walked down the stairs where we saw all the presents Santa brought everyone.  Christmas music was playing, cookies and nutbread were set out, and coffee was brewing.  Then, like every year, we went into the living room and sat down by our piles of gifts from Santa and opened all of our goodies.  Later I took a nap and then we all headed out to see Sherlock Holmes 2, since we always try to see a big movie on Christmas Day.


And that was the end of our Christmas.  Our FIRST Christmas as a married couple.  It was a lot of fun, very hectic, and I still haven't caught up on sleep.  But it was worth it and I cannot wait to see how traditions change and how they stay the same throughout our lifetime.