Created for this month's journaling challenge here and inspired by Sonja's gorgeous style. Thank you for looking.

The journaling reads:

The thing about family traditions is that they take years to build. And sometimes the strongest of traditions start in the most underwhelming of ways. This is definitely true for the way our family celebrate Christmas. It would be hard to fathom all those years later why our first Christmas together was such a non-event. Not only there exists not a single picture, but we would barely even remember it. Yet it must have been an important cornerstone in our relationship. The part where we realized that we had totally different expectations of what the celebration should look like.
Years later I would remember being excited about decorating our apartment and we must’ve talked about getting a real tree versus a plastic tree. We were meeting the boys in Stockholm and taking them skiing for the New Year’s Eve, so there seemed little point in putting up a real tree, and I think it was me who suggested we get a plastic one. It seemed like a sensible solution at the time. And it was definitely me who suggested we get a smaller one, just for ambience, because the main family celebration was going to be in Sweden on the 31st. For some reason I thought the tree would look cute in one of the window niches. The result of that was that our Christmas tree, the one that would stay with us and travel around the world, the one that would be present in every Christmas photo for years to come, turned out to be a tiny one - just over 1.5m tall.
There was also the question of food, and Josef would vaguely remember frying salmon for our Christmas dinner. That must’ve been the first year I vetoed the Czech tradition of buying a live carp and keeping it in the bathtub for a few days as a pet, then killing it and serving it for Christmas. Seriously???? He must’ve made his potato salad that I love, and we must have drunk champagne but neither of us would remember any of it.
What we would remember however was buying gifts for the boys. We didn’t know what to choose, and ended up buying a PlayStation2 and a couple of games, a gift that meant whenever they came to visit us they wouldn’t have to bring their PlayStation with them. I spent hours choosing the games, and one of those – Crash Bandicoot - would become our family’s favorite and the total must for most family gatherings.