Christmas time...

Christmas is a funny time for me.
When you marry someone from another country, like I did when I married Beth, you put yourself in a difficult position at this time of the year. Traditionally, of course, Christmas is a time for family. For gathering together and celebrating the birth of Christ with those closest to you. When you marry, you form a new family, but you also keep the one that you had, and gain another one too.
Because my family is in England, and Beth's family is here in Toronto, we're left with the choice of who we spend Christmas with. If both our families were in England, even some distance apart, we could come up with a reasonable solution - my parents, my sister and I always visited my mum's side of the family just before Christmas, with our immediate family on Christmas day, and with my dad's side on Boxing day. That's not really possible with a 3500 mile plane ride separating our families now.
We've been doing this for some time now. Last year, we spent Christmas in England - our last Christmas before we were married. Beth came to visit mid-December, and we stayed at my parents' place for the holiday. The year before, when I proposed to Beth, I had come to visit her in Toronto, and we celebrated with her family.
This year, we were in Toronto too - the decision of where we would be was largly made for us by the advanced stage of Beth's pregnancy.

All this to say, we had an amazing time this year. We spent time with friends, we spent time with Beth's family. We went out for a meal on Christmas day, and we had a nice quiet Boxing Day at home, just the two of us (well, three, I guess).
Certainly we missed my family, although the blow of this was softened by the fact that my parents surprised us with a visit three weeks ago.

Christmas can be a tricky time for families, but in many cases, it is what you make it. Just because I didn't get to see my family over Christmas, it didn't stop me remembering what a great time we'd had the previous year, or thinking about visiting them next year, or even from celebrating with them in some small way; as we opened presents from them, they opened presents from us and we spoke on the phone.
In the future, we may find that we live in a completely different country from all of our family - that's something that is yet to be revealed to us - but Beth and I will be together. I guess that's why it's so important to start our own family traditions at Christmas. Especially with a new member of the family about to join us...

Happy New Year everyone, hope you all had, are having, and will continue to have an incredible holiday, whoever you're with.
Love.

(Apologies to someecards.com for stealing their lovely image used in this blog.)