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It occurred to me this weekend as we were cleaning out our basement that this Christmas will be the twentieth that my husband and I have spent together as a married couple. I realized that when I came across a box filled with letters we sent to each other during our engagement, when we were living a thousand miles apart--he in Puerto Rico, where he was stationed with the Coast Guard, and me in Louisville, planning our wedding.

What’s weird is that, even after we married, we lived apart for almost two months. When we settled on our November 1st wedding date more than a year in advance, my husband hadn’t yet been assigned to a cutter, and I was still in grad school. By the time we married, I was back working in retail management, and he was spending the bulk of his time under way. The months of November and December, in particular, he was going to be gone almost all the time, and those were the months when the owner of the shop I managed did ninety percent of his business. So my husband and I decided I would work that extra time so we would have the extra money, and I’d arrive in San Juan on Christmas Eve. It seemed like a nice date to start our life together.

It was dark by the time I arrived, the air warm and heavy when we walked out of the airport and into the night (it had been below freezing when I left Louisville). We headed straight to the apartment he’d found for us and which I had yet to see, a tiny place on Ashford Avenue with an ocean view--if you stood in the kitchen and held your head just so and squinted through two hotels across the street. I’d mailed a box earlier that contained my gifts to him, including a stocking I’d stuffed, but I honestly don’t remember what I bought him that year. Probably a book. Maybe a cassette. A shirt of some kind. Nothing major. I remember he gave me two pairs of earrings, both made locally, which I still often wear.

We didn’t have a tree. He didn’t have time to get one. And even if he had, we only owned maybe a half dozen ornaments we’d received as wedding presents to put on it. We didn’t have a fireplace, either--not exactly necessary in the tropics--so we hung our stockings on the backs of the dining room chairs. (Not that we had a dining room, either, mind you, but we did have a table and chairs, rented, like the rest of the furniture, along with the apartment.) We spent Christmas Eve exploring our new neighborhood, filling slot machines in the casinos, sipping rum punches at a beachfront bar, listening to salsa music and walking through the warm ocean surf in the moonlight. It was like no other Christmas Eve I had ever spent before. And I loved every minute of it.

Christmas Day was eighty-five degrees, and we went to the beach again, this time in our swimsuits. We ate our Christmas dinner at the only restaurant we could find open--Pizza Hut, where they had an all-you-can-eat buffet and all-you-can-drink sangria for one convenient price. Again, completely untradtional. Again, completely wonderful.

This year, we have two Christmas trees, and five stockings hanging on our mantle (the cats get one, too, of course). My husband and I will spend a bit more on our gifts to each other now than we did then. My entire family will be at my house Christmas Day, which has become a rarity. We’ll have our traditional dinner of country ham and cheese grits, prefaced by appetizers and my husband’s wassail, surrounded by holiday music. Best of all, the weatherman is saying that maybe, just maybe, we’ll have snow.

But I think, this Christmas, my thoughts are going to be returning often to that day twenty years ago, when my husband and I ate at Pizza Hut and went to the beach, and I received two pairs of earrings. That was, by far, the warmest Christmas I ever had. And not because of the weather.

Who else has spent a holiday doing something you normally wouldn’t? What unconventional holiday traditions do you and your family have? What was the best holiday you ever enjoyed?