This Christmas is our second together both in person and as a married couple. That made last year an incredibly special one. However, that doesn’t mean this second Christmas needs to be the Speed 2: Cruise Control version of our favorite holiday.

Jenny and I enjoyed a relatively quiet Christmas last year. I can’t remember too many specifics other than going for a nice long walk around the town when our bodies were urging us to at least do some exercising following a weekend of piggying. Who am I kidding? We got married three weeks earlier. The piggying was far more than a weekend.

We’ll keep our Christmas low-key again this year while continuing with some traditions we’ve created.

Thus far, the Christmas traditions Jenny and I will pass down to our ungrateful future children include eating the Filipino dish Humba, gorging on Mango Float, and exchanging some special Filipino gifts.

Like last year, we visited the nearby Filipino supermarket and bought each other some secret gifts to open up for Christmas. We’ve already broken down and exchanged one of the gifts, with Jenny opening up a bag of chips I got her.

Another Christmas tradition of ours is a Kris Kringle gift exchange with my Filipino-side. I’m not sure how the American-side of my family would like a gift exchange game. I feel like it’d end up too much like Michael Scott from The Office when he kept trying to upsell a horrible homemade oven mitt a coworker made him.

When we did this last year, I ended up with a footrest/stool and a video of Jenny’s family trying to get her eldest nephew to talk to me. It didn’t exactly work out the greatest since most of his experiences with fair-skinned people come from the Twilight films. It’s not so much that he’s scared of vampires as much as he hates terrible acting.

Her nephew has since opened up a little bit more to me. Twice he even asked for me by name, “Tito Tim.” Once I was there and as soon as I appeared on screen he was far less interested in interacting. Can you blame him?

This year, I’m asking for a video of him or his younger brother dancing. I don’t care if it’s baby-dancing, the robot, the Charleston, or them twerking. Christmas is not official unless I get to see at least one of them dance and I have the video evidence to use against them in 40 years when they’re politicians.