The Christmas That Wasn’t
We could have driven the eight-hour round trip to see my Mom at her retirement community. We could have gone to my sister’s house in Bend, or Dean and Jenny’s house in Vancouver. But we had had enough close calls - relatives and fellow workers who tested positive - to make it easy to decide to stay at home. Coronavirus transmission rates and COVID-19 deaths were soaring and health and government authorities were begging people not to travel in order to slow the spread of the disease. Dean and Jenny had come over the week before. Mom had been over at the same time and she couldn’t wait to get home.
Even the animals don’t seem particularly enthused.
So it was just us. We could have made an attempt at normalcy and purchased gifts for each other and maybe filled each other’s stockings. But we just didn’t have it in us this year. We had gotten so used to buying the specific things we needed without input from the other, that in November we had just said something like, “You’re getting me this MacBook Air for Christmas,” and “You’re getting me this fishing pole,” and being grateful for the break from buying something adjacent to what they really wanted and risking a big swing and a miss.
So instead we ate Christmas: biscuits and gravy, cinnamon rolls that our neighbor had given us, cookies, fudge, then a prime rib roast, our weird old family jello recipe, and a little salad to make us feel healthy.
Here’s to 2021! (Yes, that’s the weird jello salad: cranberries, celery, nuts and little bitty cream cheese bits.)
We took a walk, made a fire, watched a Christmas movie, and called it a day.
Was it the Best Christmas Ever? Not by a long shot. Was it the worst? I don’t think so. There have been several Christmases early on where Drew had to get up early on Christmas day and go to work. I was never much of a fan of going over to the fire station on Christmas. I wasn’t really pals with the other firefighters’ wives, and 9 times out of 10, the crew would get a fire and have to leave in the middle of dinner, then we would be stuck making awkward small talk and keeping toddlers from destroying the station.
The generation has come full circle and Dean spent Christmas Day at work at the fire station.
I think the oddness of it didn’t particularly hurt, but may cause a snap of the rubber band around Christmas next year: full houses, full stockings, lots of dumb not-quite-right gifts. Then gradually, gradually, we won’t think about the Christmas That Wasn’t when making our holiday plans, and we will do just what we like.