Establishing The New Traditions
This is the first year that life in the military has really messed with the holiday season. My husband has missed half of our Thanksgiving Day celebrations, but I still spent those at home with family. And as much as I enjoy Thanksgiving, it is not my favorite holiday. But this year, the military is coming after my Christmas/Hanukkah celebration.
Selling the house means that we can’t host or decorate. PCSing means that we’ll more than likely spend Christmas Day sleeping on an air mattress in our house if we still own it or crashing at a friend’s house while they are out of town. We won’t have a tree or decorations. We probably won’t do gifts since my husband hates them, and we are spending a lot of our savings buying our new house.
I can’t blame the military entirely for this, though. My family is taking a trip to Punta Cana the week before Christmas. We get back at midnight on Christmas Day. Because of this trip, we couldn’t push up our move date like some of our friends did. We would not have been able to move the date up enough for my husband to get international leave approved. Had we moved early, we could have easily spent Christmas and maybe Thanksgiving in the Carolinas with our families since we’d be within driving distance of them.
And also, because of this trip, we are using the last of my husband’s leave. He didn’t have an extra day to spare to go house hunting with me, let alone go home to see family for the holidays. My family has come out to us for Christmas for the last three years, which has been amazing, but it just wasn’t an option this year. Between everyone spending a lot of money on this Punta Cana trip and the fact that we probably won’t be in our house for Christmas Day, it didn’t make sense to even try to make it work.
I hoped we would figure out a way to make Christmas feel special, and we still may. But as we approach Thanksgiving this week, I have no idea how to make it feel like a holiday. It’s my husband’s favorite, so I never want to skip it, but I don’t know what to do. I’m an over-the-top person in general, so I have no idea how to downsize a Thanksgiving meal. I also have zero experience cooking a turkey, and I’m not all that interested in taking the task on.
I know this is an opportunity to start our own traditions. I know so many military families take pride in their holiday celebrations because it is entirely their own. They find a way to celebrate through deployments, PCSs, and TDYs. I just haven’t come up against this obstacle before. I know that’s really lucky, but I don’t know how to handle it.
I like my traditional celebration. I don’t want to mix it up, and I think y’all have picked up that I’m a pretty all-or-nothing person. If I can’t do it exactly the way I want to, I’m not sure I want to do it. But that’s not how we should approach life, especially military life. We have to be willing and able to make compromises. We have to make adjustments. I’m having difficulty finding new traditions to latch on to, though.
My husband isn’t big on gifts. My son is only one, so he’s not super engaged or excited about anything happening. Anything we do for this year will mostly be for me. I’m sure some of y’all are in this season too. It might be your first year as a military spouse, the first year stationed overseas, or the first year without a family member who was always there. How do we honor the previous transitions that were so special while making room for new ones that fit our current season of life?
This is probably the only year I need to do this, at least for the next three years. When we are in Georgia, we will be able to show up for most celebrations with family. Distance won’t be the issue, then. But who knows what happens after those three years? Maybe we stay stateside and can still travel to see family. Or maybe we end up internationally, and going home for the holidays will be cost-prohibitive. Or maybe we finally have to deal with a deployment that takes my husband away for Christmas.
As much as this year feels like a one-off that we just need to get through, it could easily be the first of many. I have a hard time coping with not getting what I want. I have a hard time with the military making big and little decisions in my life, like where we get to be for the holidays and what our celebrations can look like. But this is the reality that we live in. And even if this year just happens once, these circumstances could easily come up again, and I need to know how to deal with them.
I need to be able to handle the next PCS, even if it happens at the “perfect” time. It still won’t be easy because we’ll be leaving another home. We’ll be leaving the home my son learned to do xy and z in. We will be leaving the home that we brought my daughter home to (maybe not the next house, but it’ll definitely happen). We will always be leaving behind security and familiarity. Oklahoma may not have felt like home, but Evermore Lane certainly did. We will always say goodbye to someone who meant so much to us and face the reality that distance really does end some friendships, not all of them, but definitely some.
I need to be able to handle the next holiday season that isn’t perfect. My siblings are growing up and getting into relationships, which means they will have two families to balance as much as we do. I know we’ll find a way to make it work, and the new thing will absolutely be beautiful, but it is going to require some adjusting.
This is my trial run. Right now, I’m not doing so hot on it. This is my practice to figure out how to establish our own traditions. This is practice to handle a PCS. This is practice on how to live life with all these questions. This is practice for managing my impatience while waiting for the next thing. Because next time, I will have to lead the way for my son. He’s just one now, so he’s not saying goodbye to anything. He’s not missing out on his perfect Christmas or Thanksgiving. But next time around, he will be able to look up and see that life is changing. I get to start now, figuring out how to make those changes feel magical. How did you figure out the new traditions to celebrate during the transition periods?