Entering marriage is like getting a new job: much of its success results from on-the-job training, but if you go into it with little or no preparation at all you will be set up to fail.
As a pastoral couple, my husband and I have had the privilege of counseling engaged couples and helping them prepare them for the ups and downs of marriage. The "Ups," of course, are wonderfully easy to navigate. But it's those "Downs" that will chart a course for marital break-up if a couple is blindsided by them. That's where pre-marital counseling comes in: it helps couples to identify and anticipate those potential conflict areas before they occur, and gives them tools to solve them before they have a chance to wreak havoc on the marriage.
One potential area for conflict in nearly 100% of all Christian marriages is one that is rarely anticipated or discussed: what to do for the holidays. Times like Christmas, which most couples assume will automatically be happy and joy-filled, can actually introduce a great deal of conflict into a marriage.
Christmas is a prime example of a holiday that's rife with tradition from start to finish. When two people with two different (sometimes vastly so) sets of traditions come together and try to celebrate Christmas as a couple, the results may be disastrous if both spouses are not prepared ahead of time. The best time to talk about Christmas traditions is before getting married, not December 1 of your first year together.
I'll use a personal example. When my husband and I got married, we decided to alternate who we would spend Christmas day with. One year it would be his parents, the next, mine. Neither side challenged us on this (which isn't the case with many newly-married couples), since his parents lived in the same town, while mine lived four hours away. It wasn't as if either set of parents could expect us to go to both homes in one day.
Where the conflict actually entered, ironically, was in the Christmas dinner menu. My in-laws always cooked a traditional holiday meal of turkey or ham, potatoes, yams, vegetables, pie, the whole works.
My family was, shall we say, a little less traditional when it came to Christmas cuisine. Having had four young children, my Mom simply decided one year that she would rather spend Christmas day enjoying the delight of her four daughters instead of spending eight hours over a hot stove. We never again ate turkey on Christmas Day. Instead, we began a new tradition. Every Christmas my Mom would serve appetizers and finger foods. There were always at least six or seven different dishes, all prepared for the most part ahead of time or store-bought. We ate buffet-style, all day long. It was the only day of the year that we were allowed to eat whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted.
The first year that we spent as a married couple with my family was wrought with a small amount of angst on my husband's part. I could almost feel his turkey withdrawals. It wasn't that he didn't like what my Mom made. He was just used to something different.
This was a conflict that we weren't fully prepared for. Fortunately, after a few years it worked itself out, and both of us came to appreciate the other's upbringing when it came to Christmas. In fact, to my surprise, my husband came to adopt my loathing of turkey-roasting on December 25, and now that we celebrate Christmas on our own with our children, we too have an all-day Christmas buffet. We often compromise by having a turkey or ham dinner for New Years, a day that is far less laden with commotion and other things that would distract from the preparing of a fancy meal.
Believe it or not, an even bigger Christmas conflict beset us when we decorated our first Christmas tree. The problem: does the tinsel go on first, or last? Doesn't every reasonable person put the tinsel on first? To tell you the truth, I can't even remember which of us said "first" and which said "last." That's because after seven or so years of fighting and tears and one of us spending the night on the couch, we compromised by dispensing with tinsel altogether. (Besides, by then we had a cat that ate the tinsel and then coughed up silver tinsel balls until Valentine's Day.)
My point is that holiday conflict creeps up in the most unexpected and trivial places. And what may seem like a ridiculous practice to one spouse may be the difference between a holly jolly Christmas and spending Christmas in the doghouse. Or longer.
So couples, before you say "I Do," go out for a nice dinner together and use these questions to get your holiday conversations going:
* What was your best Christmas?
* Who usually cooks Christmas dinner in your house?
* Who did most of the Christmas shopping in your family?
* What is/was your favorite Christmas tradition?
* When do you open your Christmas gifts (i.e. Christmas Eve or Christmas Day)?
* Whose house do you usually spend Christmas at?
* Do you usually put up a Christmas tree? If so, when? (i.e. the day after Halloween? Christmas Eve? Somewhere in between?)
* Who put the star on the tree in your house?
These conversation-starters will help spark discussion between the two of you that may reveal some things you didn't know about each other's holiday experiences.
Better yet, find a pastor, church leader or counselor who has been trained in marriage preparation. He or she will be able to help you identify issues that are potentially contentious, including those surrounding holidays.
NEXT POST: Christmas...... With Kids. (Just wait till you start celebrating your holidays with a third person!)
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