It’s the holiday season! I love Christmas. LOVE Christmas. I love the smell of pine, the twinkling lights, the food, repetitive music, traditions. I. Love. It. All. This year is my first married Christmas with Mark and I have been looking forward to further establishing our already blooming traditions. One thing I’ve been looking forward to starting this year is the tradition of sending out holiday cards to our friends and family. The trouble is, the more I thought about it and tried to come up with them, the more the idea of it bothered me. It took me awhile to put my finger on it, but I felt like I didn’t deserve to send out a card because we aren’t a real family. Let me explain… It’s just us. No kids, no cats, no dogs (at least that live with us on the regular), no raccoons (we wish), not even a little fish. Mark and Aline. Aline and Mark. If we had an addition to the two of us, I feel like we could take a family photo, throw it on a card, and call ourselves, “The Guerrero Family.” I love to read about proper etiquette and before addressing the holiday cards I chose to send, I did a few cursory searches found, as expected, that unless a married couple have a child, it is not proper to address a card to The So and So Family. And it’s not just about holiday cards, I sometimes feel like until or unless our “family” grows, we will never truly be a family.

I’m sure this is personified by a combination of family pressure about being without children and just society as a whole. But you know what? I’m working on it. This is my first Christmas of being married to my husband and I want to celebrate it as a family. A family unit that is just as valid as any other. One that gets to carve our own traditions and feel the magic of the holidays. Next year I plan on addressing our cards from The Guerrero Family, but I think this is a good start. <3

Merry Christmas and happy holidays.

xo