Reinert's Tradition

This is our third year being Mrs. & Mr. Aaron Reinert during Christmas. The coolest thing about this is that I finally feel like we have real family traditions.

The first year is trying to combine family backgrounds and ways of doing things and coming up with new idea and traditions.

The second year is basically seeing if any of those things stuck from the year before. Will it turn into a pattern? Or is it something we tried twice and then gave up?

The third year is finally the year that something becomes a tradition. You did it three years in a row! You are on a roll!

One thing that has stuck through all of the Christmases that we've share, is our family vacation ornament!

Aaron and I went to Orlando, Florida for our honeymoon and so while we were at Disney World, we stopped in the Christmas shop that they have, with Aaron's Grandma Marge.

We thought that this would be the perfect souvenir for us! And ornament for the year we got married. It was in this shop that I said, "Wouldn't it be cute if we got an ornament every year that tells something about what happened that year?"

The next year while we were exploring a shop in Kauai'i, Hawaii, I found this and thought that it would be so cute on our Christmas tree.

And I said to Aaron, "We got an ornament last year from a place we went on vacation. We should get an ornament every year from the place we go on vacation!"

This year, while we were in Mexico, we made a concentrated effort to find a Christmas ornament. Which was a little hard since it was the beginning of summer.

I'll spare you the haggling story, but I'll just say that I formed a pretty fast mutual respect for the man who sold this to us.

It is a red clay, hand painted bulb. It reminds me a great deal of how bright and colorful everything was painted down there. Especially in the smaller villages that we saw. I love the bright colors and that it will always remind Aaron and I of the great trip that we had in Mexico.

I'm already excited to see what ornament we will have on our tree next year. I can't express how happy I am to be having another Christmas with my favorite man in the whole world. We've been married and known each other for so long and it is a great feeling to know that by next Christmas, I will still be with this great guy and carrying on our own family traditions.

...and maybe some carry over from our families of origin.