By Christine Cioppa
You’ve sent your care package with loads of necessities, reading materials, pictures, and goodies, including those cookies he loves to share with his friends.
What else can you do to help keep the love alive in your marriage during deployment?
Being a military spouse makes you jaded.
You always assume your husband will come home too late for dinner.
He will likely be deployed for your birthday. Again.
He won’t get a promotion even when he deserves it. He won’t get leave, even when he deserves it. He won’t get to send e-mails or phone calls during deployments, even when he deserves it.
Granted, the Navy has been good to us. I can’t complain.
New Year’s Eve is a time for renewal, celebration and, yes, those dreaded resolutions that everyone is always talking about. In my house, it’s an extra special time because it’s also when my husband and I got married.
Our wedding was on Dec. 30, 1990. Before you start doing the math in your head the answer is that we tied the knot 25 years ago today, perhaps before many of you reading this were even born. I am what you might refer to as a “senior spouse,” having been married to my husband for his entire Army career.
Want to lose weight? Learn a new language? Keep a cleaner house? Write a novel?
What is your New Year's Resolution?
The easy part is deciding. The hard part is following through.
And let's be honest, we're not experts at keeping resolutions either. Last year our staff made lots of resolutions. The easiest, or so we thought: one writer vowed to move the Elf on the Shelf every night during December. The result?
Elf:2 Staff writer: 0
No goal, no matter how small, is as easy as we think.
My birthday is 10 days before Christmas.
I am routinely and firmly a member of the December Birthday Club, where people try to pass off one gift for two separate occasions, or where people just forget to even celebrate it, amid all the other holiday hustle and bustle.
By Samantha Carroll
We love celebrating the holidays with our soldier when he is home. We enjoy decorating, shopping and attractions that are fairly local. And often times, our families will come to us.
When he deploys though, I usually pack up the motorized sleigh with presents, dogs and our daughter and cover the miles spanning both sets of grandparents. The year 2012 was no different. My husband left on December 15, so with 10 days until Christmas, my 4-year-old daughter and I used that time to keep busy and prep for the craziest road trip yet.
By Tiffany Shedd
I grew up with lots of Christmas traditions that all revolved around being with family, so as an adult I had a certain expectation of what Christmas was and what went on. Christmas can be a hard time, especially when you are a military family, because you’re often far away from family.
So, you can either lament those Christmas pasts that you’re missing or you can start making traditions of your own that you can carry with you wherever you may end up during the holiday season.
Once upon a time our family used to run from holiday event to holiday event.
We had to see the lights downtown. Uptown. Out of town.
We had to have cocoa with Santa, Rudolph and the Grinch, all at different venues and times. Then, some local brainiac decided this would be a fabulous time of year for a tea party with Elsa. Grrrrr.
There was ice skating here, cookie making there and ornament creating everywhere.
By the end of it all, I was ready to be done. Christmas had become a time of exhaustion, not joy.
The holidays can be a festive time of year, even at work. Until, gift giving goes awry. So, to keep everything cheery and lighthearted, be proactive with a little thoughtfulness and pre-planning.
For starters, “Choose gifts that are appropriate from a financial standpoint and for people you don’t know,” said Kim Zoller, CEO and founder of Image Dynamics.
Christmas is still nearly four weeks away. Plenty of time to bake, shop and make plans.
But, if you are mailing cards and gifts, your deadline is now. If those gifts are going overseas, your deadline was last week.
While the U.S. Postal Service can still guarantee delivery by Christmas Eve for domestic items, overseas shipments, especially those going to forward deployed troops, need to be sent asap.
Here are your deadlines:
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