Navigating Christmas as a New Husband

Well the missus has asked me to stop being a lazy blog bum and write something, so here I go. Prepare to be amazed at my introspective profundity.

This is my first Christmas as a married man, so naturally it is bound to be very different from what I grew up with. For starters, actually figuring out how to pay for everything with a newlywed budget is a very new experience for me. When I was younger I usually didn't give presents at all; either I didn't feel like coming up with gift ideas or I had no money. It recently dawned on me that, now that I am married, this tactic will not work if I wish to continue sleeping in a bed. The strangest part is telling Sarah how much money she can spend on my gifts, and I'm not particularly fond of that. It sounds like I'm saying "You need to get me this many dollars' worth of presents." I don't much like the sound of that.

A similarly strange task is telling her how much she can spend on my birthday, which is soon after Christmas. As a kid I was always suspicious that I would get ripped off on my birthday presents since it was so close to Christmas. Now that I'm in effect paying for my own birthday, splitting the gifts between Christmas and my birthday seems like a pretty good bargain. I'd rather sacrifice the extra presents than not be able to eat for a week. But Sarah wants to give me a "real" birthday so I gave her a dollar amount she could spend. That is also risky because what if the present she was planning to get cost way less than I told her she could spend? So I had to clarify that she CAN spend up to a certain amount, but doesn't HAVE to spend it all if she doesn't need it. I am finding all of this somewhat complicated.

So the financial part of Christmas took a while to nail down, but I think we've got it under control. I guess this is what Christmas is like for adults. The really FUN part of Christmas as newlyweds is we get to begin our own traditions. We don't have anything really ground-breaking (or door-breaking) yet, other than getting a tree that dominates half of our living room. But we will be implementing some of our favorite family traditions from growing up and making them our own, such as getting our tree on Black Friday (one of Sarah's favorites), watching A Christmas Carol on Christmas Eve (one I've always liked). Plus, since this is our first married Christmas, pretty much anything we do this month will become one of our "traditions" if we do it again next year.

All that to say, the next few weeks should be much fun. Also, If Sarah hates this post you might not be hearing from me so much anymore.