Not long ago, I wrote about dreading our trip home for Christmas. I was looking forward to seeing our families and especially our niece and nephews, but every time we go home the Ogre and I fight. It\u2019s often related to long-held disagreements about our different families and the stress of the holidays usually brings it to a head.<\/p>\n
However, this year we swore not to fight. I told the Ogre that on Christmas Day, if we fought, I would leave whatever celebration we were at and get on a plane, abandoning him with three children, one of whom would probably be really hungry. I told him over and over and over that all I wanted was a peaceful Christmas, a Christmas where we were together in spirit. He assured\u00a0 me that we wouldn\u2019t fight, that if any issues arose they would be handled calmly and without fighting.<\/p>\n
Christmas morning, we woke up and opened presents with my family. It was loud and raucous and wonderful and just like I remember Christmas from\u00a0 my childhood. While my mom cooked breakfast the Ogre and Sienna tried out her new bike while I wobbled around on my\u00a0 new rollerblades. Charlotte played with her new train, Liam slept and my brothers and sister took turns capturing our Christmas morning on the Ogre\u2019s new flip cam. It was fun, but it wasn\u2019t Christmas.<\/p>\n
Then we cleaned up in a flurry and headed out to Dallas to the Ogre\u2019s brother\u2019s house, where we were to celebrate Christmas with the Ogre\u2019s family. It started in the car; a small, nothing disagreement that should have been handled calmly and forgotten. But I was snippy and the Ogre was irritated and we started bickering. Then we got to his family\u2019s celebration, and an offhand and thoughtless remark by\u00a0 me sent the Ogre into one of his silent furies. About thirty minutes after silence descended over us, a silence that certainly did not go unnoticed by his family, we went outside to work it out. But we didn\u2019t work it out; we screamed and fought and neither of us gave an inch.<\/p>\n
The rest of Christmas evening was a bleak affair. We ate dinner in silence. His mother asked us both to let whatever it was go so that the family could enjoy Christmas, so we put up a good show. We opened presents together, but we weren\u2019t together. We were like the lyrics to \u201cEvery Rose Has It\u2019s Thorn\u201d; close together, but miles apart inside.<\/p>\n
On the way back to my parent\u2019s house we were mostly silent but still fuming. We started fighting again about halfway there, and our sleeping children, whom we had hardly seen all evening, woke up crying. We went inside to put the kids to bed but got so distracted by our anger that instead of putting them to bed, we fought and fought and fought while they sat on their beds, crying.<\/p>\n
We didn\u2019t talk the next day. The silence gave me a lot of time to think. At first I was upset because I felt that the Ogre just didn\u2019t care about me. All I had wanted was a peaceful Christmas, and he had ruined it.<\/p>\n
That line of thinking gave me about three solid hours of bitterness and self-pity. Then, resigning myself to being reasonable, I took a hard look at my own actions which had contributed mightily to the events of the day. After playing it all back in my head until I felt like I had a clear picture of the whole disagreement, I came to a conclusion. I took our fighting like that to be a sign that we hadn\u2019t changed as much as I had hoped. When we lived in Texas we used to fight like that all the time. We had a rocky and difficult relationship. But we grew up a lot in Vegas, and we hardly ever fight anymore. Even when we do, it\u2019s never loud and drawn-out. It\u2019s usually a quiet disagreement that is handled quickly. So when we come back to Texas and get into a screaming match, I see shades of the people we used to be, people I had hoped to never see again, and it terrifies me.<\/p>\n
The next day the Ogre and I sat down to talk about it. I told him the conclusion I had come to and what our fight meant to me. After talking about it for a bit, though, I realized that that wasn\u2019t actually the reason I was so upset. While those people that we were will always be with us, we simply aren\u2019t them anymore. Even when our fighting gets out of hand, it doesn\u2019t mean that we are out of hand, the way we were back then. I kept coming back, again and again, to the fact that Christmas had been terrible. That was what I was so upset about. The Ogre didn\u2019t understand why I was so upset about it until I finally managed to put it into words.<\/p>\n
We ruined Christmas. Again. Not just for ourselves, but for our children. We ruined Christmas because we put ourselves ahead of Christ. It\u2019s His day, after all. The day when we should remember His birth, His life, and His death. The day when we should remember the hope and peace and joy that He brings. The day when we should revel in those gifts which He has given us; the gift of Himself above all, but also the gift of each other. The gift of our marriage and our children. The gift of our wonderful families. But instead, we thought only of ourselves, and not just when we were fighting. The morning was wonderful, but instead of setting aside time to read the story of the Nativity or to talk about Christ, we just dove right into a pile of presents. It was fun, but it wasn\u2019t Christmas.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re trying to reclaim that lost day now. We\u2019ve bought the girls each a few small presents and have been taking time each day to give them their presents, talk about Christ, and spend some quiet time enjoying our children and each other.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s all we can do now, but we have yet another gift to be grateful for soon: the gift of a new year. What a blessing it will be to wipe the slate clean and begin again, to dedicate ourselves to putting Christ first this year. Next Christmas will be different. Next Christmas we will celebrate the coming of our Lord first, before presents, before breakfast, before coffee and definitely before arguments. I suspect that if we begin the way we should, the rest of Christmas Day will fall beautifully into place.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Not long ago, I wrote about dreading our trip home for Christmas. I was looking forward to seeing our families and especially our niece and nephews, but every time we go home the Ogre and I fight. It\u2019s often related to long-held disagreements about our different families and the stress of the holidays usually brings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1110,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[207,196,6],"class_list":["post-334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christmas","tag-going-home","tag-marriage"],"yoast_head":"\n