Holidays apart isn’t healthy

By Julie

Hubby and I do not have a Christmas ritual, or a ritual for any other holiday for that matter; maybe one will emerge once we have older children, but one sure thing at the moment is that we will spend all our Christmases together.

Otherwise what’s the point of being married if one of us will troop to their shaggz, or sister’s house over the holidays, at the expense of another? The other might as well fly to the Mara solo.

Holidays will forever be family time.

Budget

Which is why my alarm bells went off when my friend Linda told me she was planning to travel to her upcountry home for Christmas. She wasn’t taking her husband with her. Over Easter, the two again went to their respective homes.

Which reminds me of another friend, Hannah, who got this sudden impulse to visit her mother’s home, but despite pushing all the buttons to coerce her hubby to drive her there, he wouldn’t budge. He had not planned to travel that weekend; travelling was unbudgeted for (think fuel and shopping) and he was working, anyway. But Hannah knows no newly married woman leaves her husband behind and goes to spend the night with her parents.

The first question my mother would have asked me is where my husband was. Because of the distance, she might let me spend the night, then send me on my way early the next morning. Alternatively, she would call my hubby to come collect his family, to make sure that all was well between us.

Is it any wonder that some communities give a woman a bed on her wedding day as a signal to tell her that her abode henceforth is with her new family?

For Linda, all I did was jokingly tell her to stay with her husband over Christmas,I don’t know if she gauged how serious I was.