What do you remember about your first Christmas together? Do you have a special “our first Christmas” ornament? Do the first gifts you exchanged live on in infamy? Did a Christmas tradition come out of that first season?

If you’re still fairly newly married, you probably have a great recollection of that first Christmas, others of you (like me) are scratching your heads, trying to remember something, anything about that time!

Our first Christmas together as a married couple was fourteen years ago. We were living in a tiny apartment in Blacksburg, VA because where we were students at Virginia Tech. The thing I remember most about that first Christmas was our tree. Being college students, we were lacking in extra income so we ended up with a $10 tree from a  local tree lot. It was ugly but it was ours!

Now, you remember how I mentioned the apartment was tiny? The tree was technically too big for the space we had but that didn’t deter us. We got it up, with great effort and we got some lights on it. However, the tree didn’t seem to want to stay upright! It kept falling. And the needles kept coming off. And it was truly an ugly tree. Nothing we did helped to keep it standing up or make it look decent. Worst of all, it became a constant argument trigger between us.

Less than a week after getting the tree and putting it up, I had had it. I turned to my husband and said, “Get that thing out of here!” He promptly (and gladly!) removed it from the apartment and true peace was restored to our lives! While I was disappointed that our first Christmas tree was a disaster, it was better than dealing with tension it caused in our home.

What about your first Christmas together?

Sarah told me:

I was 21, and we’d been dating for about six months at that point. His son was two years old, so right away, I was tossed into this maternal role regarding the holidays. I remember buying his son a Red Wings sweat suit. And I remember my (now) husband’s parents getting his son a talking Big Bird that scared the beejeezus out of the kid. We had to take the batteries out and hide it!

But we still have our ornament and it’s still on our tree, though over the years it got a little mangled and it’s now hanging up with a paper clip. Seriously. We’re so classy.

We had a teeny tree in our teeny apartment. We had an even teenier tree on our little screened-in porch. I remember we would sit outside in the evenings with a glass of wine and our teeny light filled Charlie Brown tree; talking about our workday. Such happy memories.