On March 31, 2025, my wife and I will celebrate our 63rd wedding anniversary — if we survive the 2024 Christmas season. There are hundreds of books and articles written about how to have a happy marriage, but I’ll bet none of them have anything in them about the importance of living through the Christmas holidays as a couple.

First, let me say that women are the driving force behind the holidays– not from a shopping standpoint, but from their focus on trying to make everything perfect.

Each one of them feels that the entire holiday season somehow rests on their shoulders.

Personally, I marvel at how much pressure they put on themselves to make everything perfect. In addition to selecting the proper holiday gift for each recipient, they also focus on the perfect decorations, and cooking and baking enough food that could have fed all the soldiers that fought at Gettysburg with enough leftovers for them to take home after the battle.

This year was a personal struggle for us in the Kasun household due to my wife undergoing a knee replacement and some heart issues I have been dealing with, which came as a surprise to many of my friends who insisted I didn’t have a heart.

This was compounded by me falling a few weeks ago and adding a cracked rib to the mix. The cracked rib greatly limited my ability to lift or move heavy items, including getting the tree and Christmas decorations out of the attic.

However, in spite of all that occurring and a knee on the mend, my wife still managed to get the house decorated with three trees and four wreaths. We also have so many outside lights that the squirrels in my area are wearing sunglasses.

Inside the house, everything that doesn’t move has garland and battery-operated lights draped over it. The cost of the batteries alone for the initial lighting was equivalent to many items that appear in the national defense budget.

I am pretty sure I could have bought my own personal helicopter for what I have spent on batteries to date.

All of the initial decorating is finally behind us and my wife is now into one of the more critical and most stressful phases of the season, the preparation of various baked goods and custom fudge packets. Our kitchen looks like a cross between a medical MASH Unit at the height of battle and a missile launch site right after a missile exploded on the pad.

In many ways it is like “No Man’s Land.” I stay out of the kitchen, but remain within earshot in case I am called upon to open something, reach something on the top shelf, make a grocery store run for some missing ingredient or to clean up some pots or pans so she can reuse them for the next production run.

The really interesting part about all of the baking is that although some items are intended for specific persons or events, a lot is produced “just in case someone stops over.”

Now I understand that logic, however it seems like every year I am in charge of finding room in the freezer to store these “just in case items” and guess what I find tucked away in the back? At least one or two packages that we froze last year “just in case.”

In any event, the clock keeps ticking and we are in the home stretch. Shortly, the women in our lives will slowly start to ease back and return to the normally relaxed, loving and caring human beings we know and love. As a group they deserve our thanks, our support and our love.

So, to every woman out there and especially to my wife, Sandy, “Thank You” for all you do and being who you are in spite of us, (the husbands), being who we are.

John Kasun writes from his home in Duncansville where he keeps a sharp eye out for his favorite walnut bread that he hopes Sandy baked, “just in case.” Merry Christmas to all.