How do you celebrate holidays?
Some holidays in my family have more importance than others, but we’ve always been a family that got together for everything. We would celebrate birthdays (no matter the age), Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and all federal holidays in person with each other growing up. On Easter and Christmas Eve, there were the extra get togethers of going to church and, while I still don’t like that I was going to church when I don’t agree with the beliefs, I respect now that my grandmother was just trying to bring family together. This is important because our family is very dysfunctional and has been for my entire life; I think my grandmother wanted some amount of normalcy on these days.
I think, for me, the worst part about holidays was seeing all of the extended family members who were never kind to my mother or any of us kids. I was looked at as less by many members of the extended family because I was born in a second marriage; my mother has now been married three times and those family members don’t see anything past the first as “real”. I understand not believing in divorce for yourself, but to have strong feelings about a child that was born into it through no fault of their own is cruel. I’ve known for a long time now that these people are not family of mine and will not be invited to important parts of my life.
I hope to start our own traditions sometime, but I’ve never been huge on traditions. I don’t plan on having children, so all holiday traditions will just be for me and my fiance; maybe we’ll come up with fun ways to involve our pets in these antics, but for now I’m okay with them not being a huge deal.
