Erie Bay Christmas - breaking with tradition

I love traditions... but from time to time my legalistic, first born side emerges and the line between tradition and "everything needs to be perfect" become a bit blurry.

My wonderful, warm traditions that conjure up sweet childhood memories can quickly turn into heavy hitting, hardline rules for holiday success.

Our move to New Zealand was born out of a desire to shake things up and break with tradition a bit. There isn't much in our lives that hasn't been whacked with the wand of "change". We are trail blazing this year and Christmas was no exception.

The pile of rocks neatly decorate with red and gold chiffon ribbon was our 2013 Christmas tree. I promised the kids that we would cut down some kind of tree and decorate it - we didn't do that. At 8:00 pm on Christmas eve I started feeling legalistic and guilty - hence came forth the rock tree. There was a little bit of confused conversation about it in the morning... and then everyone went out to look for crabs. No big deal.