By Courtney Burkholder
Guest Columnist

The year my husband and I married was an adjustment on many levels, and the holidays were no exception. I’ll never forget our first Christmas as newlyweds. I couldn’t wait to decorate our apartment – buy the Christmas tree, hang the stockings I had painstakingly needle-pointed over the past summer. I could just picture us listening to Christmas music and drinking eggnog as we trimmed the tree. It was going to be wonderful!

The first problem arose when it was time to get the tree. My family had always had a real tree, preferably a Blue Spruce as they had the strongest limbs for holding ornaments and the best scent. My husband’s family had always had an artificial tree. This was much easier, more cost effective, and wasn’t a fire hazard, he patiently explained.

An artificial tree? Was he kidding? My argument that my family had survived 25 years without suffering a fire fell on deaf ears. He would not even consider a real tree.

Not wanting to ruin our first Christmas, I relented. I even shopped around and found a semi-decent artificial one at The Market. Yes, it was a bit pricey, but it was fake and had twinkling lights, and that would surely make him happy.

But he had other plans. His parents had recently bought a new artificial tree and had an old tree in their attic and graciously offered to share it with us. It was a perfectly good tree, he assured me. He failed to tell me was that it was 25 years old. I didn’t know that until we pulled it out of the box. The branches looked like bottle cleaners and had to be poked into the green metal pole in the center of the tree. Instead of fresh pine, it smelled like an old, musty attic. I told him this. The base was bent, and the tree wouldn’t stand upright. I didn’t help. Instead, I got out air freshener and sprayed it all over him and the tree. Then I sat on the couch and flipped through a magazine. When his finger got smashed in the mesh of metal as he tried to make the tree stand up, I hid my smile. That wouldn’t have happened with a real tree, I told him. In the end, he tied a string around the metal trunk and nailed it to the wall.

As we hung the ornaments on our pipe-cleaner tree, we talked about Christmas. He told me his favorite part of Christmas was opening the stockings. His mother had wrapped each and every item in the stocking including the new toothbrush and the pack of gum, he told me proudly. I laughed. I mean, really. Who gets a toothbrush in their stocking? You wrap the gifts under the tree, I explained. Not the ones in the stocking. And Santa gifts aren’t wrapped either.

He looked at me like I was from another planet. “You’re gifts from Santa weren’t wrapped?”

“Of course not. Santa doesn’t have time to wrap gifts! They are displayed in piles around the room.”

“Well, I feel sorry for you!”

The argument escalated and ended with me running into our bedroom, slamming the door, and yelling, “It will be a cold day in Hell before I wrap a pack of gum!”

That was 13 years ago, and thankfully, we have worked out most of our tradition challenges. Each family has traditions that should be honored. Take from your families the memories you cherish, and integrate them into your own holiday celebrations. The melding of family traditions is what makes each generation special and creates the basis of tradition for your children.

Stuffing or dressing? Wrapped or unwrapped? Real or artificial?

It doesn’t matter. What matters is that our children hear the stories of our childhood and learn about their families’ traditions as we create our own.

And in case you were wondering, we now have a beautiful live Noble Fir in our living room, and I have already started wrapping the gifts for the stockings – including a toothbrush!