Christmas Of 2020 Turned Out To Be One Of The Best Ever
Even if it had to be delayed
Christmas of 2020 was turning out to be a nightmare. Not just because of COVID, but because my oldest kid wouldn’t be able to get home for Christmas Day.
We already knew we wouldn’t be able to see friends and extended family the way we wanted to. Knowing that we’d also have to miss one of our kids was almost too much to bear in a year of so much loneliness.
I’d never experienced Christmas without the entire family under one roof, and I wasn’t ready to give it up.
At the time, my daughter directed a COVID recovery shelter, providing a safe environment for the homeless while they recovered from their illness. She and a few other full-time employees managed the small operation while employing a group of part-time college students to assist with patients.
Remembering what it was like to go home for the holidays, she couldn’t bring herself to schedule the students on Christmas day, so she scheduled herself and a few of the other, older volunteers to mind the patients. She would only be able to take a few days off to be home with us, and it would have to be after Christmas.
We’d take what we could get, so as a family, we decided to move Christmas back a few days and celebrate on the 27th, when my daughter could be with us.
On Christmas Day, we did our best to stay busy. I’d made arrangements with my brother and sister to drive by their homes to at least scream Merry Christmas to each other from the safety of the car.
My family loves avocados, and ordinarily, we’d gift each of my siblings with a full bag from our trees during the holidays. But, since handing a bag of avocados to someone was problematic in 2020, we resorted to lobbing them at each other from the car windows.
I suppose we could have left them on the sidewalk, but throwing them at people was way more fun.
Ever try to catch an avocado with a catcher’s mitt? My nephew reports that it’s almost impossible since the fruit is lopsided and doesn’t follow a predictable trajectory. It was fun watching him try, though.
Late the next evening, we smuggled my daughter home from the airport and pretended it was Christmas Eve. Normally, we’d have neighbors for dinner, but this evening would be just us.
It was the best fake Christmas Eve ever.
We had appetizers for dinner, in keeping with our little family tradition. We ate guacamole made with our own avocados, drank hot cocoa by a fire, and worked on a 1,000-piece puzzle featuring dogs in Santa hats at the dining room table. Then we got into our jammies, hopped on the couch with the dogs, and watched A Christmas Story on TV until we couldn’t stay awake.
The next morning, on the 27th, we celebrated as if it were really Christmas Day. We opened gifts while drinking great coffee laced with my husband’s homemade molasses. Breakfast was the usual huge affair, featuring biscuits and gravy, scrambled eggs and cinnamon rolls.
It was all you could eat all day long, even for our dogs.
We wore our pajamas all day and didn’t bother to comb our hair. I doubt any of us even showered, but no one minded. We had nowhere to go and nothing more to do, so we sat around all day in lazy bliss.
Still in pajamas, we ate a prime rib roast for dinner, plated decoratively on formal Christmas china, paired with an excellent estate reserve Zinfandel. Our undisciplined pups sat at our feet, begging for scraps.
The pictures I took from that evening, which I won’t share, looked like trash visited the Ritz Carlton Hotel. We didn’t care. We had fun being ourselves.
If you ask them, every member of my little family will tell you that was the best Christmas we’ve ever shared with each other.
It’s not that we don’t like Christmas parties, dressing up to visit people, or exchanging gifts. It’s just that playing avocado baseball and sitting around like slobs all day was truly a gift in itself. I doubt there will ever be a more laid-back Christmas.
2020 didn’t win. We did.