Passing Seasons and Budding Traditions

There are two pretty significant steps happening in our lives this winter.  One is that Ryan will finish his football career at BYU.  Although it might not be sprinkled with awards and honors, Ryan is happy about the opportunities he's had to represent BYU on the field, learn from teammates and coaches, and get really sweet gear and bowl game gifts!  At times being apart from each other and enduring the lonesome weekends was miserable, but looking back on it all it's been a fun journey.  We look forward to much more time spent together come January, even though both our schedules will be littered with work and study commitments, but at least we'll have more time for each other on Friday's and Saturday's.

The next significant step is our first Christmas together and establishing new Folsom Family traditions.  It's going to be great!  We had a great discussion concerning our family traditions and strangely enough, they are mostly the same, at least when it comes to Christmas.  It was fun to recall Christmas experiences and what made them special, what brought the Spirit of the Season, and what particular parts we hold dear and can't wait to perpetuate with our future family.  Since we are both from the same town we've decided to treat our holidays like we are from different places.  We figure that will make both families happy, and if it doesn't, tough!  We'll do one holiday with one family and the other holiday with the other family.  This abbreviated Christmas we'll spend with the Folsoms and next Christmas we'll spend with the Thompsons.  We are lucky to have such great families to spend time with, look up to, and have fun with.  We are excited for the time when we have our own Christmas with our own little ones and establish our own traditions.  Luckily, we already have many traditions in common.  As we chatted the other day we realized our Christmas traditions are close to identical.  For example, on Christmas Eve each child opens one present and (when we were younger) all the kids sleep in the same room.  We usually sing hymns and read stories and reflect on the meaning of the season.  When we wake up, we eat breakfast first, line up youngest to oldest, and proceed to the family room.   We start with our stalkings first and divy out the presents.  Once everyone has their own little pile organized we open presents youngest to oldest, one by one.  That's quite a bit to have in common, right?  Granted we will combine some of our old family traditions, but we would like to create some of our own.  For example, we would like to adopt the idea of the advent.  Each Sunday leading up to Christmas we will do something special to celebrate the season and teach our family about the birth of Christ.

(P.S. writing these blogs can come so easy at times, but it can also be tough when you have a spell of writer's block.  Ryan and I sat on the couch and blitzed through some of this post and trudged through the rest.  We'll get better!)