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Yup families of origin have always played a big role in our marriage.

For instance my husband's family's love language is presents. Like many, many small gifts all the time for every holiday. Holidays are hugggge in his family as a result. It drives me bananas bc I don't want all this stuff and I'm expected reciprocate which is insane because the family keeps growing!! (Luckily DH personally is a words of affirmation and touch love language kinda guy). But I come from a poor family where we did one larger gift for holidays, usually something we needed, and we always showed love through service. So when DH just wants to hire someone to do something it irritates me because my parents would fix it themselves or make it themselves, etc.

It was something we realized early on in our marriage and we have had to adjust a lot. So I send cards and gifts allllll the time to his family to show I love them in a way they understand. DH and I verbally and physically express love a lot so he knows he's loved. DH does a lot of stuff for me around the house and with our son to show his service based love. And he has helped my parents financially enormously during our marriage and they see how much he serves me and DS at home so they know I am loved well.

With regards to our son, it's informed a lot of things we DON'T want to do, almost more than what we do want to do. My parents have a terrible marriage and we work hard at avoiding their conflicts and issues. We both never had fun vacations growing up so we plan to do that more when our kids are older. We want to provide for their college as much as we can because DH and I paid our ways. My parents were broke and I had a lot of stress as a kid because of our finances so we are super disciplined about money and debt. DH never recalls his parents fighting so we try to model that. My mom was a screamer and I try not to be. We both had close relationships with our grandparents so we try to foster that. I really try to de-emphasize toys and presents for holidays. I never had many photos taken of our family growing up because my parents were always working so I do regular portraits. My parents worked all the time and weren't around much so DH and I structure our work schedules to be present for our son as much as possible.

@Applesandbananas: haha yes, definitely modest by HB standards.

I definitely see differences from our families of origin, though I think some of it also has to do with the very different communities that we were raised in. I'm from a kind of hippie-ish college town, and we were comfortable and had any books we wanted and many toys, but definitely not any trendy thing just because, and especially not big expensive trendy things (like, I had a few pogs, but no furbies ). dh is from an affluent big-city suburb that was very "keeping up with the joneses," and his mom is a big shopper, so he and his sister had everything trendy--air jordans, beanie babies, tamagachi, etc etc etc. the materialism is kind of out of control, imo, and I really don't want lo to feel entitled to anything she wants