Another Holiday Season, Survived
Well, we got through that. Once again, it wasn’t exactly what anyone planned or exactly what anyone wanted, but we got to enjoy what we got to enjoy. No guests, no visiting, no travel. Even with just three of us here and the absolute minimum amount of celebration and food, I still found Christmas exhausting. It is just always an endurance contest, no matter how little we’re trying to do in a day.
Because we’re in the midst of moving the younger one out, there was an amount of moving box chaos going on, so it wasn’t until the Monday before Christmas that I got the tree up and a single string of lights hung up on the porch. The tree didn’t get decorated, exactly, as that seemed a bridge too far, although Lee did festoon it with trolls, a new Adirondack Park ornament that we bought on vacation in September and tucked in with various other Christmas gifts, and some random ribbons from the wrapping paper box. Good enough. Oh, and old pictures of our children from The Nutcracker years, which is very much a part of Christmas for us.
Other than the Christmas songs I was learning to sing this year (with much appreciation for the open mic crowds who sat through my renditions of “Christmas Is Interesting,” “I Was Thinking I Could Clean Up For Christmas,” “Merry Christmas Emily” and “St. Stephen’s Day Murders”), we played no Christmas music until Christmas day, and then we kept it to The Nutcracker (at certain points during which Roz fairly lept off the couch from dance training muscle memory), She and Him, and Aimee Mann. That was it. That was all I needed, and all I could take. We had a lovely video call with our daughter in Troy, had pork and waffles for dinner, watched “Scrooged” together (along with an earlier viewing of “A Muppet Christmas Carol,” the limit of our holiday viewing this year), and were all well exhausted by night’s end.
The plan had been to travel north to see my mother and daughter this week; I should be in Troy at this very moment. But as we looked at the pandemic case numbers rising astronomically, particularly in New York, and heard of more and more breakthrough cases among those who, like us, are vaxxed, boosted and masked, the risk just became not worth it and we cancelled those plans, hoping that in a month or two things will have leveled off. It turned out that we had potential exposures among the visitees, and one real exposure to an extended family member here, so nothing was going to go according to plan anyway.
But, I’m on vacation nevertheless, and doing just about nothing. I spent much of yesterday fixing a massive break in old Hoxsie articles, caused by a recent hack that screwed up all my websites but Hoxsie the most. Nearly everything is functioning again, but articles from about 2015 and earlier are largely missing their images, which need to be put back in one at a freakin’ time. Reminds me of how prolific I used to be!
We’ll be doing some more moving this week, some odds and ends, setting up for a carpentry project, and then, who knows.