Create Your Own Holiday (Also, Chicken Kiev and Rice Pilaf)

Everyone knows that holidays can be very stressful, and since I have been married, that stress has only doubled.  We have to have two Thanksgivings, two Christmases, and countless other get-togethers with extended families and cousins.  Even when we were living in the same city as most of our extended family members, we had to schedule every major holiday.

My wife and I moved away from our families last year and now have to drive a significant distance to visit our relatives.  So, now we ave to schedule everything even tighter than before.  Oftentimes, we just have to miss events with one family or the other and we do our best to make everyone happy and to take turns, but this is not always possible.

We have decided that it would be nice to have one holiday that is ours, no one else's.  There won't be scheduling conflicts, because no one celebrates it but us.  It is a holiday for the family that was created when we got married, and our brothers, sisters, parents, nieces, nephews, and maybe one day our children.  We can begin to pass down this new tradition and mold it to fit our specific wants and needs.

Sorry for the poor photo quality, my best camera is my phone.

Step 1: Picking The Date (Elimination Round)

The first step is finding an appropriate date for the new holiday.  I'll start by creating a simple calendar, and then removing existing holidays that we observe.  Obviously this calendar will look different for other people.  I removed Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, the 4th of July, Halloween, and Christmas.  Mother's Day, Father's Day, and Thanksgiving all have date rules, so I shaded out the entire block of dates that they would be able to land on.  These are shaded in red.  We considered removing Easter even though it has no significance for us personally (but, we do have family members that observe it).  The only reason we didn't is because of it's ridiculous date rule.  Getting rid of it would have basically removed the entire month of April.

As our family grows, it would be impossible to make certain that anniversaries and birthdays never interfere with the holiday.  However, we can go ahead and take those into account for the people that existed prior to the holiday's creation.  Next, I removed important anniversaries from the calendar and shaded them in blue.  Finally, I removed birthdays from the calendar and shaded them in orange.

Comments

[CatTrampoline]

Nice idea. We moved 2000 miles from our relatives (the distance can be both a blessing and a curse) and had to try to build new traditions for all of the big family holidays. I always celebrate May 18 as Volcano Day (anniversary of the 1980 Mt St. Helens eruption) and serve volcano-themed food.