How Breakfast Changed my Marriage
And just like that another holiday season has come and gone, anyone else think this year flew by? Seems like you get to Labor Day, snap your fingers and it's Halloween, blink and Thanksgiving and Christmas are here just like that! I have always loved the holidays! I love the decorations, the friends and family, the gatherings and the food!
If you have ever taken a look at my Instagram ( @hashtaghappyjess go ahead and take a peak, I will wait right here). You will find I LOVE Christmas. When we bought our house, and I first laid my eyes on my fireplace, I knew we would likely never light it (we still haven't, over 2 years later). But, I had a very clear vision of what my Christmas decorations would look like in front of that fire place. If you scroll back, to our recent Christmas photo, you will see my Southern Living magazine worthy photo of our tree, wreath, stockings, all of it. I am beyond proud of making that vision come to life.
As much as I love the holidays, this time of year is incredibly difficult too. My dad's birthday was on December 16th, Christmas is of course the 25th and he passed away on December 29th, to say December is a tough month, is a severe understatement. Even with all of those emotions, my Momma never wavered to hold the holidays together for all of us. She was the master of holidays, no one can do it like she could, I will probably spend the rest of my life trying. After she passed in March of 2017, that same year for Christmas, I decided I need some new traditions, because my Momma was the center of our family and she was gone, I needed something new to look forward to!
The love for traditions is in my DNA as a southern girl, but when your Momma was the queen, taking over suddenly feels a little overwhelming. Even the thought of attempting to fill her shoes gives me heart palpitations. Deciding to create my own family traditions was both painful and powerful, choosing to let go of things I cannot change and designing a new idea of what family and holidays looks like has been a process. Even with the pain, the thought of new traditions gave me hope.
Germain and I sat down with cocktails one night and talked about new traditions we wanted to start and #BreakfastShowdown was born! . I am not sure who came up with this idea, but since Germain isn't writing this, I am going to take credit. Sunday is our favorite day of the week, I keep myself (and us) on the go most of the time and Sunday is when we all slow down as a family, even Abby Roo! Sunday breakfast is by far my favorite part of the weekend, so we came up with a friendly competition for who could make the better breakfast. You should also know, (and because I feel like bragging on him) Germain makes 95% of our meals. I work more hours than I am proud to admit and he makes sure Abby and I are well cared for and fed! This tradition allowed me to give him a break, at least every other week to relax.
Not only did this start to build are own family traditions, but it also made for some extremely fun interactions between our friends through social media. So many people follow our journey of who makes which dish and I am pretty sure I could open up a pop up shop in my dining room on Sundays and help pay our mortgage based on the requests I have had to come join us on Sundays! Now that I am saying it, I might consider an open house brunch, if you’re local, let me know if you would be interested. Free of charge, of course!
So how did this silly thing change our marriage? It gave us dedicated quality time together. If you're married or in a long term relationship, you probably know that life can make it hard to carve out quality time together. Sunday morning is a set thing, something pretty outrageous would have to happen for me to skip it. This exercise in cooking and then sitting down together to enjoy our meal has become our weekly date night on Sunday morning! We have also had so much fun finding new recipes, and we have even taken cooking classes together as a real date night, and I personally have a blast photographing our meals.
Losing both of my parents by the age of 35, disintegrated my family structure. They say great things can come from pain and I would say this fits this mold. I wish I could say we came up with this out of nothing just for fun, but the truth is, I needed this. I needed to create something that was just mine so I could keep my family heritage alive in some form. Breakfast changed my marriage, and also is helping heal my broken heart.
What are some of your favorite family traditions?
