In the Fowler family one of my favorite Christmas traditions was the Christmas quilt that we each got to sleep with one night and then it was passed around the family for the whole month of December. I remember dutifully taking it to my brothers room to let them sleep with it, but only after I counted out the days perfectly to make sure I could sleep with it on Christmas Eve. And then the breakfast casserole that we had every morning after looking through our HUGE stockings. In the Peterson family, Logan always looked forward to listening to his dad read The Night Before Christmas on Christmas Eve after opening Christmas pajamas! And a breakfast of crepes and homemade hot cocoa. We both came into our marriage with different ideas on Christmas breakfast and how to do stockings, but we’ve decided to make some of our own traditions and figure the rest out along our way 🙂

One tradition that I love has to do with something the Peterson family does. Every year they get a new ornament that represents something about their family or something they did for the year. Instead of doing any random ornament, we have gotten picture ornaments from big things or some favorite memories from the year. For our first year of marriage, we have one from our wedding day when Logan’s ears are SO bright red because of the cold. Our second year of marriage is from our trip to Mexico where we escaped to after a crazy semester. And this year, we printed it off from our trip to Hawaii! Hawaii let us get our feet back on the ground and really refocus our lives on our marriage and the things that matter most. I’m so excited to continue to add to our Christmas tree with these memories and ornaments! Some day we will have lots of stories to tell our kids while we are decorating the tree all together!!

Another one that we decided on this year is that we always want to set up the tree together. We both have different parts that we do better- Logan is the best at the lights and I do the ribbon- but we want to spend time putting it up together! Because we have lived on what Logan makes as a server at Olive Garden and now The Hickory, we know that tips aren’t always great. One night on our way home from a wedding this month, we left a little bit more generous of a tip than normal. Someday we want to be those people that leave a really big tip, but for now we will just put a little extra in to one great server during the holiday season.

We hope that no matter what stage you are in your marriage, that you take the time to figure out the give and take to each others family traditions and that you create your own too!!