new christmas traditions

After a lot of thought about how much I hate the presents part of christmas, I proposed that each person would only receive one gift from us each year. When I was a child, we did get multiple gifts but we also didn't get stuff whenever we wanted something all year long. Birthdays and christmas was about it - that was the sum total of all of our shit. That is, until I was old enough to work and buy my own stuff. So this year, Venci agreed and each kid had one gift to open (except Kirill, he got nothing but didn't really notice). When I informed Tanya she lost her shit but not in the same way she used to lose her shit so I suppose you could say progress has been made. Later she even admitted she kind of understood. Maria was cool about it until her little rich friends started posting long lists of gifts they received. Being different is always challenging. In this case you want to do what you think is right but you also do not want to be disappointing to your children. Hopefully since Kirill and Elli will only know this tradition they will not complain later. Don't worry, my breath isn't held.


New tradition #2. We needed to do something with those empty stocking so each Christmas Eve we will put on our new Christmas pajamas and wire a letter to each member of the family. On Christmas morning we read the letters and all the letters from previous years. It was sweet and I look forward to one day shoving letter number 20 in the overflowing stockings.

We also modifies a previous tradition, which is eating everyone's favorite meal for Christmas dinner. Now that we are a family of 6 that is just too much so instead we each pick one part of the meal. This didn't actually happen because on Christmas day we ended up going to a party that we were invited to on Christmas Eve that we were subsequently uninvited to and then reinvited hours before we had to leave. Needless to say, I was not excited about this but my husband really wanted to go so I took one for the team. I can be nice sometimes.