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Tag: memories

Christmas is in…how many days?!

Is it time to panic? I think it’s time to panic. To be fair, my family’s been hit pretty hard with some challenges this year. My husband just tested positive for COVID, despite all efforts toward being safe. Three years he dodged it. Only to be hit with it five days before Christmas. What terrible luck! The good news is that it seems to be a mild case, and he’s already feeling a bit better, so we may have a chance of having our holiday celebration on Sunday. However — and here’s the tough part — we’re worried about anyone else coming down with it in between. We are quarantining, distancing, masking, and doing everything we can to avoid catching it, but you know how that works — sometimes it’s just the luck of the draw. If anyone does get it, then it’s game over. We are already having a second celebration the Wednesday afterward to accomodate my sister, who can’t be with us for Christmas due to having to work, so we could, theoretically, have the whole thing that day — if everyone’s okay. But prep-wise, which my mom and I are doing (as usual, and in some considerable pain as we both have a genetic hip/back issue that’s acting up), we don’t know what to do yet. Do we make the food as if we’re having it Sunday? Or do we wait a bit? I already cleaned the bathroom (my usual job) because regardless, that needed doing. But…having…

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First Minion, Knitter of the Squid

You’ve seen this shirt, right? Sorry I’m late. I didn’t want to write. When you lose a friend on the internet, you may not even know it for a while. It’s sad. You meet someone, in the wilds of the internet, who lives states or even oceans away from you. You form a friendship that is very, very real to both of you, though the world still looks down on meeting people online. Maybe you exchange addresses, to exchange cookies. Send each other gifts. Mention your online friends to the people around you, but if they were into the same things your online friend and you are, they’d know your online friend. Then something happens. There is a friend-shaped hole in your internet, and you go snooping about the edges, maybe reaching out to acquaintances, lovely people you don’t talk to much, but know they shared a different passion with your friend than the one you talked to her about. If you’re lucky, you find your friend. Computer was down, internet broke, they just needed to be quiet–all’s well. If you’re unlucky, you find out your friend passed away, and no one who knew that knew enough about you to tell you. My dear friend Bea passed away last month. I will miss her, more than I think i even know now. She was my friend, and she was my biggest fan. She loved Knight Errant, saying it was one of her favorite books. IIRC, once she declared me and…

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Holiday Wishes: Remember to Love

Here we are, five days till Christmas, and it feels like time has just flown by. I can remember sitting at work on December 1st thinking, “wow, twenty-four days till Christmas. It will be forever before we get there.” And now, here we are, twenty-one days later. The mind boggles. (I have a conspiracy theory that time is actually speeding up and it’s not just our perception of it. Why, I couldn’t tell you. But it’s real.) Last night, my accountability group was discussing people we’ve lost, and how it’s been affecting our holidays. And it made me think back to my childhood. And this morning on the bus, I tried remembering my grandparents’ old house. Because when I think of Christmas, I am always hurtled through time to when we had Christmas Eve at my grandparents’ house. It was a small, two-bedroom house with a basement, a dining room, and a small kitchen. My grandparents had a beautiful tree with these antique ornaments on it (some of which grace our tree now) and a Santa on a sleigh that actually spun around the tree. It was neat. There was always mistletoe hanging from Grandma’s kitchen doorway. And, of course, there were other decorations as well. But that tree sticks in my mind. So we’d all go to Grandma’s for Christmas Eve — my aunt, my uncle, my cousins, and of course, the four of us — my dad, my mom, my sister, and me. Usually, they’d be someone there who didn’t have anywhere…

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