Archive for the ‘Love and Marriage’ Category

Lucky February 13, Part 2

Posted: July 23, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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I can only take credit for a few of the ideas in this blog.  Most of them, I got from other people.  For Valentine’s Day, I searched through dozens of people’s blogs, read books, and talked to people to find ideas.  What came out of all that was a combination of lots of other people’s ideas with my own interpretations.

After the Saturday evening massage. and after my wife was asleep, I snuck out of bed and set up some things for in the morning.  I had a bunch of confetti that I had cut out of some red, pink, and white paper, and I scattered it throughout our loft. Then I put a piece of paper on the floor to look as though it had been slipped underneath the door.

At the top, in bold print, it said “Official Notice.”  The paragraph under that was written in the language of a court paper.  One of the few benefits of having gone through divorce and child custody fights was knowing how to make the paper seem legitimate.  My goal was to make her think first of all, that it was from the landlord, and then that it was some kind of summons after she started to read.

What it actually was, was a declaration of my love for her.  Each paragraph started with “whereas,” as though it had been prepared by an attorney, but instead of being legalities, it was things that her love meant to me and had done for me.  I knew that when she got out of bed and went down the stairs in the morning, she would find it.  She did, and it worked exactly the way I intended it to.  It still sits up against her mirror where she gets ready every morning.

I took her to the “Beauty And The Beast” play that afternoon, which was wonderful.  Then I bought all the ingredients to make a seafood dinner and we went back to the loft where I cooked for her.  I served it to her in courses with a good white wine and it turned out to be more than we could eat. I also made a dessert called “Cupid’s Pie” that I found a recipe for out of a cheesecake crust, ice cream, cool whip, and cherries.

For a gift, I had a small metal box that said “You and Me” on the sides and also had hearts on it.  It was actually supposed to come with the purchase of a watch at Macy’s, but I talked a lady at the jewelry counter out of one.  In it, I put romantic coupons for the upcoming year.  All of these things were simple, but meaningful.  I didn’t have to spend a lot of money, but I didn’t go cheap either.  I chose things that would make the day special, and sought to create some lasting memories, rather than just another dinner and bouquet of flowers.

I did have the bouquet of flowers delivered to her at work on Monday, the actual Valentine’s Day, but that was mostly because she likes the attention that it brings from the other women who work there.  It was the best Valentine’s Day ever, but not because of an expensive piece of jewelry or an elaborately planned date. Those things wouldn’t have meant near as much as being known and loved by someone who took the time to make it special on her terms did.

Lucky February 13

Posted: July 22, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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Valentine’s Day is supposed to be the most romantic day of the year, when couples celebrate love, and singles try to create a spark with the one they have their hopes set on.  It’s also a very stressful day for a lot of people due to all of the expectations, and it’s one of the times that it’s most common for people to break up.  Lucky for my wife and I, we had been through all of the breaking up and getting back together when Valentine’s Day arrived, so there was little or no stress, and the only expectation was that we would continue to experience the joy of the love that we had renewed.

Even so, I was determined to make this Valentine’s Day one to remember.  For weeks ahead of time, I was searching the web for creative ideas and ways to make it unique.  No last-minute reservations and flowers this year.  I was on a mission to shower my wife with romance and this “holiday’ just gave me an excuse to go overboard.

The actual Valentine’s Day was on a Monday this year, which obviously doesn’t work well, but that gave me the weekend to turn into, you guessed it, a more-than-one-day celebration.  Sunday was the 13th, and it was also the day that the University near our loft was hosting a stage production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, my wife’s favorite fairy tale.  It was an afternoon performance, so that allowed me to buy tickets to the play and then make dinner plans for afterward.

I started with a special surprise on Saturday night.  I had ordered some ebooks online, and one of them had complete instructions for giving a one hour, full body relaxation massage.  My wife has always loved back rubs (don’t all women?), and I’ve always been glad to give them, but with this, it was taking it to another level.  This was an example of giving a gift of myself, and knowing my wife well enough to know what would really be meaningful to her.  It’s also a gift that she can use over and over again.

Saturday evening, I warmed up some towels and massage oil, lit candles and an aromatherapy oil burner, and put on a relaxation cd on the stereo.  I had her lay down and I explained what I had bought and what I was going to do.  Needless to say, she loved it, and there have been many such massages taken advantage of since then.  Anyone can learn to do this, and it gives a couple a very intimate time to spend together, where you can also use words to complement, reassure, and build up your partner.

The following day was to be our Valentine’s Day, even though it would be February 13, not the 14th.  I had a number of things planned, and I’ll share them in tomorrow’s post.  The 13th would turn out to be a lucky number indeed.

Vacationing In Wine Country

Posted: July 21, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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My wife and I are currently vacationing in California wine country.  I will make every effort not to miss a day with the blog (it ends August 6th), but the posts may be shorter and less direct over the next several over days.

It’s been a dream of mine to take my wife to wine country for a few years now.  She’s never been to California, while I’ve been many, many times.  As a kid who grew up in Phoenix, California was always just a few hours away, and it was almost always Southern California that my family visited.

As an adult, it has been northern California, and specifically Napa and Sonoma counties that have caught most of my attention.   I’ve been a wine writer as well as a teacher since the early 2000’s, so in recent years, I’ve had the opportunity to take press trips to wine country, not only in California, but overseas as well.  My wife has never been able to accompany me on any of these trips, and that has led to some of the dichotomy of feelings that both of us experienced during the time leading up to, and including, our separation.

What I mean is this.  When I wasn’t completely sure that I wanted to continue to be married, I still cared about my wife very much.  She had been my best friend and partner for many years, and I valued her company.  When I would spend time away from her on these trips, I always wished she could be there.  I wanted her to be meeting the people I was meeting, tasting the food and wine that I was tasting, and experiencing the lifestyle that I was living.  As great as these trips could be, something was always missing, and that something was her.

On the other hand, there was a part of me that wondered what it would be like if we didn’t stay together.  A part of me thought that maybe I would be able to move to another part of the country and live a whole new life on my own, and these trips also had the effect of reinforcing that notion.  When I was traveling with other writers, I was known to them only as myself, not as one half of a couple, and this part of my life seemed totally separate from the part that had a wife and family and a full-time teaching career.

I was never unfaithful to my wife while I travelled, although I know she worried at times.  What I mostly wanted was for her to be there.  Nevertheless, my life had two contradictory parts competing, and only one could win out.  When my wife was exploring the idea of making a new life without me, she was experiencing many of these same emotions and thought patterns.  She was testing out a future that would require her to leave her current life behind, but still clinging to the wish that it would be me that she would experience true love and companionship with.

Now that we are well on our way to happily ever after, I got the chance to share this part fo my life with her.  My parents bought us plane tickets to California so we could spend some time with my brother and his family.  Since we were coming to the state anyway, I set up some winery tours and visits through some of the people I have worked with.  We are spending the first few days in Sonoma County and the Napa Valley, and my wife is having a wonderful time, as am I.  It’s another little dream coming true for us, and I couldn’t be more proud to introduce her to everyone and have her share this time with me.

Snow Days and Silly Fun

Posted: July 20, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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Very often, in the process of restoring an older house, you run into things that you weren’t expecting.  You have to re-think, adjust, change your plans.  There can be an awful lot of “now what?” moments.  Those are the times that you can either choose to get upset that things aren’t going the way you want them to, or get creative and see them as an opportunity to come up with something new and different.

As  teachers in the Missouri Ozarks, snow days are the reality we live with nearly every winter.  Snow days interrupt the normal flow of life, and while kids almost universally hope and pray for snow days, teachers and parents don’t always share their sentiments.  For a kid, the future is this afternoon, or tomorrow.  They don’t look much beyond that, and any day out of school is a good day as far as they are concerned.

For me, snow days have not been very well received in the past.  The way I looked at it was this:  My lesson plans were going to get off track, and we were going to have a day off when the weather was terrible, thus having to give up a spring holiday when the weather probably would have been nice.  Worst case scenario was that we would have to tack make-up days on to the end of the school year, so summer vacation would be shortened.

This last winter, we had an especially high number of snow days, so much so that all of the above happened.  An interest thing happened, though.  My wife and I were in a completely different place in our relationship than we had ever been before during a winter.  Our nest was empty, so we didn’t have the kids to figure out what to do with, and we were very much in the honeymoon stage of back togetherness.  I still didn’t want to have to lose holidays or go to school longer than we were scheduled to, but these snow days came in a different flavor than the ones from past years.

This year’s snow days were an opportunity to stay in the warmth of the loft and watch the storm through the windows.  They were times for cooking together, making hot chocolate, movie marathons, building jigsaw puzzles, and lots of cuddling.  Since we live downtown, we would also brave the snow to walk to nearby places such as The Cup (a cupcake specialty shop), several nearby coffee shops, or the Bistro Market, our downtown grocery and bistro.

My fondest memory of last winter’s snow days was something that would never have even been a thought in previous years.  My wife and I don’t watch TV.  At all.  We don’t have cable, satellite, or any type of television service.  We’re just not interested.  Somehow, though, our oldest daughter got us interested in the show Big Bang Theory.

She buys whole seasons of shows on DVD and she had three seasons worth of Big Bang Theory.  She loaned us season one just to get us to try it.  My wife liked it right away, and I came around to it after a few episodes.  During the snow days last winter, we ended up going through all three seasons, cuddled up on our new couch and laughing together.  It was entirely silly fun, but whenever I think about the old loft and last winter, those are some of the memories that are best and brightest.

There’s Joy In The Knowing

Posted: July 19, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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When my wife was making her decision to choose to stay married, and asking me to come back to her, one of the things she said was, “You know me so well.”  She was referring to my knowing what she liked and how to take good care of her.  That only happens in relationships that have lasted a long time.

To know another person deeply and completely is part of the very nature and fabric of what marriage is supposed to be.  It’s supposed to be for life, and within that commitment and unconditional love should be the freedom to fully reveal yourself to another.  Each person should be able to know and trust the other fully, and be accepted and loved for who they are.

Like so many things, this knowledge, over a long period of time, can be either a strength or a weakness.  One weakness is that we can assume we know all there is to know about the other person and no longer make the effort to try to learn more about what is going on inside him or her.  Another is that people can feel that they no longer have much to talk about, because they have already disclosed everything about themselves to their partner.

We found that we could see how well we know each other as a strength in our relationship.  For us, it has become a source of fun and joy that we can finish each other’s sentences and that we often know what the other is thinking without either of us having to say a word.  Rather than see it as boring and old, we see it as some of the glue that binds us so tightly together.

Just the other day, we were invited to lunch by a lady who worked at the school with us last year.  At one point, my wife and I were talking about something and the other lady made the comment that we had obviously been together for a long time.  We hadn’t realized it, but she was hearing a conversation that made no sense to her, yet she could see that we were understanding each other perfectly.

One day, shortly after we had gotten back together, my wife and I were in the car and I had the air conditioner on.  My wife reached up and flipped one of the vents all the way up and I asked her, “Is it too cold?”  Then I immediately starting laughing and answered for her, because in that instant, I realized that I already knew exactly what she was going to say.  She would have said, “No, I just don’t like it blowing in my face.”

The reason I knew this was that we had been having that exact same exchange for 14 years.  What made me laugh was that it had taken me until then to realize it.  For almost a decade and a half, she had flipped up the vent, and I had asked the same question and received the same answer.  I guess the reason it clicked that day was that, having been apart and then reunited, we were in the unique position of having all that body of knowledge about each other, but living in the dynamic of a brand new relationship, where we were really paying close attention to each other.

Since then, we have been “getting to know each other” all over again and celebrating both new things we are learning about each other, and things we already know.  When we went to Eureka Springs recently, we found out what each other’s favorite candy bar was.  We each thought we already knew, but that was based on old information that had changed over the years.  It’s fun discovering that there are still things to learn, and it really helps eliminate the tendency to take each other for granted, or get into a rut with our relationship.

About a week ago, we were in the car and my wife said to me, with affection in her eyes, “Who else could I say fried tickers to and would know what I mean, or make the car sound and would laugh every time?”  She recognized while we were apart that the grass isn’t greener on the other side, and the unknown isn’t as pleasing as the one who knows you so well and loves you completely.

Love Is A Verb

Posted: July 18, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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Love is a verb.  Yes, that can be a cliché, but there’s a lot of truth where that statement comes from.  To paraphrase a speaker I once heard, love makes a much better verb than noun.  Love as a noun is something people have never quite been able to grasp.  What is it?  It’s too mysterious and too abstract to function well as a noun.

As a verb, love becomes visible and tangible.  You can see it, feel it, experience it, and do it.  In fact, you have to, if your “love” is ever going to be anything more than a feeling.  Hear me on this; love is something you make, and to make something requires action.

Mort Fertel’s “marriage fitness” concept was one of the things I used to save my marriage.  It was a powerful idea to me, being a fitness person, that you can “make love” by doing actions like giving gifts, using kind words, spending fun time together, and building another person up.  When my wife said she only felt friendship toward me, but didn’t feel love anymore, I “made love” where there was no feeling.  I built those feelings in the same way an athlete builds muscle or stamina.

It took time and it took committment.  It was a day after day, week after week, month after month process.  A 90 pound weakling doesn’t go to the gym two or three times and expect to look in the mirror and see a muscular physique.  It takes work, but that person can and will build muscle if he stays with it and does what it takes.

I know lots of people who talk about wanting to be more fit, but they don’t do the things you have to do to be fit.  They make excuses instead of dong the work.  No one has time, but some people make the time.  When they start, they don’t stick with it.  They fail to follow through either because they aren’t seeing results, other things interfere, they don’t want to spend the money, or they perceive it as being just too difficult.

It’s the same way with a failing relationship.  I didn’t see results from my wife for a long time, but I kept doing the actions.  I got discouraged and distracted at times, but I kept doing the actions.  I made a decision that I wanted my wife’s love more than I wanted any other thing this world had to offer, and I stuck with it, no matter what.  Too many people say, “I tried, but it didn’t work,” when they weren’t in it for the long haul.  They wanted the quick fix, but fizzled when it was going to take much more time and work than they bargained for.

Now, my reality is this:  Once in shape doesn’t mean always in shape.  A person who is physically fit will begin to decline after only 72 hours of no physical exercise.  Once I had built up that love and had my wife securely in my heart and life once again, the work wasn’t finished.  In fact, if I want a happy love life, it will never be finished.  Just like if I want to stay in shape, I can never quit exercising.

When I get up in the morning, I very rarely feel like going to the gym, or getting on my bike, or hitting the running trail.  If I only worked out when I felt like it, I rarely ever would, and I wouldn’t be in shape.  I go and do it anyway, because I’m committed to the results, and that requires me to go through the process, because you don’t get one without the other.  So it is with my marriage.  I’m committed to doing the same things now that I did to save my marriage, because if I don’t, my marriage fitness will begin to decline, just like my physical fitness will decline if I stop working out.

People want more love in their marriage.  They want more romance, more spontaneity, more fun.  Do the actions.  That’s how it works.  It’s simple.  It’s not easy, but it is simple.  You won’t always feel like it.  Do it anyway.  Your spouse won’t always respond the way you hope for. Keep doing it.  Commit to the results if it’s the results you want.

It doesn’t have to be big things.  It doesn’t need to be fancy restaurants, expensive gifts, elaborate dates, or the like, although those things have their place.  It can be the little things, like really listening when your spouse needs to talk, remembering what he or she likes and showing up with it as a surprise, choosing to say words that build up and never tear down, and lending a helping hand at the right moment.

I’m committed to results, and that means doing what it takes.  Here’s the best part.  It’s so much more than worth it.  I never knew that our love could be this good.  It wouldn’t be without the work and the actions that have built it up and made it what it now is.  That’s why love is best understood as a verb.

Girls Just Want To Run… And Be Loved

Posted: July 17, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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Yesterday morning was the annual Girls Just Wanna Run 5K.  It’s the largest women’s only run/walk event in the state of Missouri.  It’s also one of the runs my wife participated in last year while we were separated.

This year, it was bigger than ever, with over 1.000 registrants and well over 900 actually completing the course.  As I did last year, I volunteered so that I could be part of it, although obviously, not as a runner.  Lots of husbands and boyfriends serve as traffic directors, man the water stations, etc.  I try to get stationed near the start of the course so that I can see my wife go by, then get to the finish line in time to be there for her after the last person passes my intersection.

As a traffic director, I get to watch hundreds and hundreds of women pass by, but I only have eyes for one.  Last year, as my wife came by, she was sort of on the outside of a fairly large group of runners, so she was more or less running right toward me.  I smiled and said a quick encouraging word (which she didn’t hear because she had her headphones in), but she gave me a high five, and I was pretty much on cloud nine with that.

This race was deep into our separation and was at a time when it was really sinking in that she might not choose me or ever come back to me.  That little gesture, and really any sign of friendship or affection at that point, went a long way with me.  At last year’s finish, she was exhausted from the extreme heat and disappointed with her time.  We hung around for some of the activities and door prizes, and also just so she could have a chance to recover from the heat and humidity.

After the race, they held a zumba demonstration, put on by some instructors from a local fitness center.  My wife was looking for a new zumba class and wanted to meet one of the teachers.  We went over and talked to him about the class, and at one point, he asked, is this your husband?  There was way too long a pause before she said yes, and I was really struggling with fears and doubts.  I knew that as fit and attractive as she was, she would have no problem getting pretty much whoever she wanted, and I didn’t know at that point how to make her want me.

Thank goodness it was always me that she really wanted deep down and I was able, with God’s help, to show her enough to make her believe that things were going to be right again between us.  She just needed to believe that I was really going to love her forever the way I had promised to so many years ago.  That race would be the last one she would run in before we were together again, although it didn’t seem possible that day.

Of course, this year’s race was an entirely different story.  I got an enthusiastic high five from her at the turn, and there was no doubt that we both felt the same way.  It was hot again, but her time was quite good and she nearly finished in the top 10% of the field.  She was still disappointed in her standing in her age group, but I kept telling her, “you beat almost 900 people today.”

It was wonderful to be a couple afterwards, instead of me feeling like a tag along that she may or may not have wanted to be hanging around.  We knew quite a few people at the race, and most of them have never known us as anything other than a committed husband and wife.  That’s how quickly and completely things can turn around, and that’s why you need to never give up if you’re struggling or fighting for your marriage.  Keep believing and do what you need to do, but never give up.  There’s always hope.

Back Out West To Old Dodge City

Posted: July 16, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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Driving home from Tennessee took the better part of a day, but the very next morning, we were back in the car heading toward Dodge City, KS.  We had lived there before moving to Missouri in the Summer of 2005, and we still had family and friends in the area.  The stated purpose of our visit was to see two of our daughters and my wife’s Mom and Stepdad over the Christmas holidays.  On a deeper level, we needed to go back there as part of the restoration tour.

It was while we lived in Dodge City that my spiritual problems really came to the surface.  I never wanted to live there, but my wife and I both felt that God was calling us to, so eventually we went.  We had a very difficult time there on many levels.  We were the victims of numerous property crimes, which isn’t particularly unusual with the gang problems that city has, but it was still frustrating.  My job became less and less satisfying as well, to the point that I seriously considered getting out of teaching and finding a different career.

A lot of people would say that if we were really doing God’s will, then we should expect to face obstacles and adversity, and that would be true.  What we didn’t expect to face was all of the internal problems and fighting that went on within the church that we were trying to work with.  There was sexual misconduct among the leadership, power struggles over who was going to be in charge, and way too much of people pursuing their own agendas.  Our family went through a lot of disillusionment and hurt during those years and, unfortunately, I blamed God for choices that people made.

When we finally left, it was bad for us financially in that we owned two houses in Kansas and hadn’t been able to get either one sold, but I felt that I was literally dying out there and something had to change.  I asked God to have grace and mercy on us and to let us try to start over.  I had good intentions when we moved, but I didn’t see things through.  Once we had lived in Missouri for just a short time, we went through the tornado and I really never recovered.

Last July, toward the end of our separation, I was going to visit my daughter, who lives in a small town near Dodge City.  My Mother-in-Law said it would be good for me to come stay with them, so I took that as a good sign for our marriage and I did.  They have a guest room in the basement of their house and that’s where we usually stay when we visit.  It was good to see everyone, but it was also agonizing to sleep alone in that bed.  Beyond that, it was terribly difficult being 400 miles away from my wife at a period of time when I had no idea what she was up to or if I would ever be able to win her back.

When we went there last Christmas, a lot of healing took place.  It was the first time we had been there since getting back together, so it was a celebration of more than just Christmas.  We were also rejoicing in all that we had overcome.  For me, it was wonderful to be back, but not alone this time.  It meant a lot to me that we also spent some time walking around and revisiting some of the places where we had really fallen hard and suffered a lot of losses in the years prior.  We can never get those years back, but we don’t have to live with bitterness and anger because of them.

A Tender (and White) Tennessee Christmas

Posted: July 15, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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Last Christmas, much like last year’s anniversary, was far too big to be limited to just the twelve days celebration and Christmas Day itself.  This was the Christmas of restoration, and we had lots of plans.  Christmas break from school fell in a good way last year and gave us a few days off before the actual holiday, which was really nice.  Some years, the last day of school is nearly Christmas Eve, so it’s difficult to get any last minute shopping in, or do much entertaining or going to Christmas parties.

We were planning two trips over Christmas break, one to the East, and the other West.  To the East was Tennessee, and since we got out of school on December 20th, we decided to leave a little early and get there before Christmas.  This cut into the twelve days in that we left on the 23rd, which is our 11th day of Christmas, but I already had her twelfth day gift bought, so I just brought it along in the car.  We made the 22nd our unofficial Christmas Eve because I wanted to exchange some gifts with just the two of us before we went to Tennessee.

When we had kids at home, I never wanted to travel over Christmas.  In my family growing up, we always had Christmas at home, so after we opened our presents, we had lots of time to play with them.  I wanted our kids to have the same experience, so we mostly let relatives come see us, instead of going to visit them.  Last year, as empty nesters, we could do whatever we wanted, so we just made plans according to our own schedule.  If that meant our Christmas morning was December 23, then so be it.

Even though we would be exchanging gifts with my wife’s family on the actual Christmas Day, I wanted to have a small Christmas with just the two of us first.  There were certain gifts that were very meaningful to us, but that others wouldn’t understand, so I wanted us to open them privately.  I also knew that it can get pretty chaotic in Tennessee with large families and lots of kids.  A quiet, romantic morning before all the hustle and bustle was what I was going for, and it was very special.

Christmas Eve was a day of shopping, cooking, and catching up.  It was busy, but not overwhelming.  We cooked the dinner at my in-laws’ house that evening to give them a break, since we knew they would be cooking up a storm all the next morning.  There were a few gifts exchanged that night, but it was mostly agreed that we would wait until the next morning.

Our white Tennessee Christmas morning

When we got up on the 25th, we found that it had started snowing during the night and given us a surprise white Christmas.  There were still some gentle flakes falling outside, and it was just enough to turn everything white without making travel difficult or becoming a hassle.  It was just one more little thing that made it extra special, like God was giving us a little gift to show us that He was thinking of us.

We pretty much feasted all day and played games late into the night, and my wife finally fell asleep sitting up in her chair while we listened to everyone telling stories and such.  It was very different from the way we usually spent Christmas, and very memorable.  It was really great to go there and just be taken care of, so we could just relax and take it all in.  We still had to drive back home on the 26th, then head right back out on the 27th for yet another Christmas and an important stop on the restoration tour

12 Days of Christmas

Posted: July 14, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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Almost every year, for the last fourteen that is, my wife and I have kept up our own celebration of the twelve days of Christmas.  Now, I know that the interpretations of when those twelve days are varies widely.  I also know that what we do is our own tradition, born out of love and romance, so it doesn’t have to agree with anyone else’s philosophy or ideals.

I’m not really sure how it started.  I have memories of it going way back to the very early years of our marriage.  I’m sure it was my wife’s idea.  I just don’t remember how it actually came into being.  It’s just something that is unique to us as a couple, and last Christmas, it needed some restoration.

We count back twelve days from Christmas, which makes December 13 our first day of Christmas.  On December 13, I give my wife one gift.  On December 14, I give her two of something, three of another thing the next day, and so on.  No turtle doves, pipers piping, or lords a leaping, and no repeating of the gifts day after day as in the song.  Just gifts of any sort that somehow match the number of the day, one through twelve.

Some of the days are extraordinarily easy.  Day one can be anything, of course, and so I only have to decide whether to make it something big, or something simple.  If there is to be an expensive gift in the twelve days, day one is very likely where it will be found.  Other years, it’s as simple as a single rose.  Day two can be earrings, again if there is to be a more expensive or fancy gift as part of the twelve days.

In years where the budget was especially tight, or I was working two jobs, the twelve days could sometimes be a bit stressful.  What I didn’t understand then was that the value of the gift was totally irrelevant to my wife.  She was just as happy with five pieces of candy as she would have been with five golden rings.  She wasn’t expecting me to spend hours searching for the perfect thing or spend a lot of money.  Her love language is gifts, and she just wanted me to be thinking of her and surprising her with whatever I would come home with.

Most years, it was fun, although some days were a challenge.  There aren’t many things you can buy in packages of eleven, for example.  I would have to get creative and do things like eleven ounces of something, or pick out nine individual items of things that went together.  For some of these, I would write out coupons that she could redeem for back rubs and so forth.  I also bought calendars, memberships, and/or subscriptions for day twelve (12 months),

In 2009, my wife said she wasn’t expecting me to do the twelve days of Christmas if I didn’t want to. I didn’t, and I think it was only the second year that we ever skipped it.  As I’ve mentioned before, the lack of really celebrating Christmas that year was what helped convince my wife that I no longer loved her and that our marriage was coming to a close. That wasn’t exactly the case – I was just confused and didn’t know what to do – but she had seen her parents divorce after a difficult Christmas and saw this as the writing on the wall.

Last year, I couldn’t wait for December 13, so I could start the days of Christmas.  Since it was the year of the restoration tour, I wanted it to be the best ever and it was.  I could tell that God was in it, too, because it was so easy to find all the gifts. Not only that, but it seemed that every one of my ideas worked out and I was always in the right place at the right time.  It wasn’t stressful at all, and was actually the most fun I’ve ever had with it.

I was able to get some great surprises worked in, like eight ounces of her favorite lotion, when she never even knew I had been to the store where they sell it.  She loves food and sweets, and I actually found nine, ten, and eleven in food items that she wasn’t even aware of.  I didn’t have to spend a lot of money, and I understood that this was all about speaking her love language, not trying to impress anyone or choose gifts of a certain monetary value.

By doing it the way we do, the twelfth day is actually Christmas Eve.  Then the next day, she gets all of her regular Christmas gifts, not only from me, but from the rest of the family.  She gets to tell everyone all about what she’s been getting all during the twelve days, which is also part of what makes it fun for her.  I get to be the romantic hero, and it’s really pretty easy, especially when I have someone that’s so easy to love.

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