• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Soldier's Wife, Crazy Life

  • Home
    • My Disclosure Policy
    • My Privacy Policy
    • Contact Me
  • Advertise With Me
  • The SWCL Shop
  • So Your Spouse Just Deployed, Now What?
  • Duty Stations
  • Surviving Deployment
  • Military Life
    • Movies & TV
    • Disneyland
    • Books
You are here: Home / Military Life / Celebrating The Holidays When Your Spouse Is Never Home

Celebrating The Holidays When Your Spouse Is Never Home

October 16, 2015 by Julie 2 Comments

Celebrating The Holidays When Your Spouse Is Never Home

Celebrating The Holidays When Your Spouse Is Never Home

I don’t want to count up the amount of times I have been alone with my children during a holiday. It is not fun. It really takes some of the joy out of it. However, I have learned how to deal with it and how to make the best of it. One thing our family has done that has really helped is deciding to celebrate certain holidays on a different date.

Now for some holidays, when my husband is gone, there isn’t much I can do. Holidays like Halloween and the 4th of July are more community events so I can’t exactly plan to celebrate those on a different day. We just have to enjoy them without my husband, be a little sad about it and hope that next year we will be together. Last 4th of July my husband had his two-week National Guard drill and was gone. We missed him but we enjoyed a pretty cool fireworks show courtsey of my neighbors. We didn’t have as much fun as we would have if he had been home but we still made it work.

Other holidays that are more family centered are easier to change. The two main ones we have done this with for our family are Thanksgiving and Christmas. One year my husband was supposed to deploy on Thanksgiving. The nerve of the Army doing that to us! Well, the mission comes first and that mission said they must leave on Thanksgiving. We could have just decided to skip Thanksgiving that year but I knew my heart would be sad if we did. So we celebrated a week early.

I got up that morning just like it was Thanksgiving. I made most of the dinner, my husband helped with the rest. We were lazy, had fun together and it felt exactly like Thanksgiving even though it was a week before. So when actual Thanksgiving came, it felt like a regular Thursday. We dropped my husband off and we were sad but I didn’t feel like we were missing Thanksgiving together because we had celebrated the week before.

Last Christmas my husband had to be away for work. We didn’t know this until December 18th. So what did we do? We celebrated on December 19th. We told the boys that we would have to celebrate Christmas early, that we notified Santa and that everything would be okay. That night the boys went to bed very excited because it was their Christmas Eve. They woke up the next day to presents under the tree. We did everything we normally did on Christmas from watching the boys play with gifts, to making a nice meal, to just being together. It felt exactly like December 25th! It was great!

Now I know this method won’t work for everyone. And it won’t work for everyone every year. If your husband leaves for deployment in August and won’t be home until February you are probably not going to celebrate Christmas that early. In some cases you will just have to go about the holiday without them knowing that they might be home the next year.

However, if you can work with the dates and celebrate early, do it. It will make the actual day so much easier. You will feel like you already celebrated it. You won’t feel like you are missing as much. You can make your memories for the year and it really doesn’t matter if you celebrated on the actual day. All that matters is that you had your family time together and made a special day before your spouse had to leave.

What do you do about the holidays when your spouse is away? Any special tricks for getting through them?

(Visited 147 times, 1 visits today)

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Email
  • Print

Filed Under: Military Life Tagged With: christmas, military life

About Julie

Owner of Soldier's Wife, Crazy Life. Writer, reader, coffee drinker. Mom to three boys, wife of a National Guard soldier. Living life in Tennessee.

I wanted to let you know about the InDependent Wellness Summit, March 1-6, 2021! 

It's all virtual! And you can either sign up for Free General Admission or receive 30% off of their VIP All-Access pass using my link! 

Previous Post: « Amsterdam & The Netherlands
Next Post: 5 Ways Military Spouses Can Get Involved In Their Civilian Communities »

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Emilie from BurkeDoes.com

    October 17, 2015 at 8:58 am

    I will not be able to spend Thanksgiving with Casey this year, which I’m super bummed about, but I know that I’ll have seen him earlier in the month, so maybe I’ll suggest us doing our own Thanksgiving! I love this tip!

    Reply
    • Julie-Soldier'sWife,Crazy Life

      November 9, 2015 at 2:32 pm

      I’m sorry you won’t be able to be together either. I hope something works out to have it early 🙂

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Primary Sidebar

About Soldier’s Wife, Crazy Life

Soldier's Wife, Crazy Life

Welcome to Soldier’s Wife, Crazy Life! I am so glad you are here.

My name is Julie and I have been an Army wife for almost 15 years now.

My husband of 18 years has served in the active-duty Army and now the Army National Guard. We have lived in Germany & Tennessee during our time as a military family.

We have three boys and have been through four deployments together.

I hope that you can find support for your own deployments, pcs moves, or anything else military life brings you 🙂

~Contact Me~

Sign up for your FREE Guide to the First 30 Days of Deployment!


Thank you!

Check your email for confirmation! 

.

Top Posts!!!

  • Is Rank Really An Issue When It Comes To Making Friends As A Military Spouse?
  • 14 Tips to Help You Survive Basic Training When Your Spouse Joins the Military
  • Living in Rota, Spain
  • Why You Should Break Up With Your Military Boyfriend
  • When You Are Raising a Military Child
  • The First Night After the Deployment is Over
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy

Footer

Archives

Copyright © 2021 Soldier's Wife, Crazy Life on the Foodie Pro Theme

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.