Skip to main content

Keep Christmas with you (or at least some cookies)

I hope all of you had a lovely Christmas. If yours was anything like mine, you may still be in some sort of a food coma. I started eating a lot of cookies Christmas Eve and since then have stopped eating (not just cookies) only when I was at church, in the car, or sleeping. A lot of my pants are too big anyway...

Anyway, now that the secular season is winding down, I wanted to share some observations:

  • Even though I have been listening to Christmas songs since the 19th of November (Light-Up Night is the "official" start of the season in the Burgh), I am not ready for the radio stations to stop playing the jolly tunes. This morning, I was pleasantly surprised to hear Christmas songs on two stations, but I am guessing that is for us Church folk, who are still in the Christmas season. 
  • I like to think that I have finally accepted that no matter how many times I ask my MIL not to buy Jordan a lot of gifts and/or spend a lot of money on her for Christmas (and birthday, for that matter), as long as she can financially do it, she will do just that.
  • At the same time, I also am hopeful that beyond this year, I will be okay with people who spend way more on me than I on them. I am not saying it is easy or that I don't feel a little bad, but I have my priorities and know what I can and cannot do (or at least what I should and should not do).
  • I hate to think that this could be the last year that Jordan believes in the fat guy in the red suit. But I know that time is running out. Almost as frightening? When that happens, that probably means Santa Facie will have to start wrapping gifts. Crap.
  • Almost as depressing? The fact that I will most likely never have a photo of my kid with Santa. This is not just Jordan's eighth Christmas, but her eighth Christmas of standing at least two feet from the guy. At least this year she worked up the courage to say hi from a short distance!
  • I am still bummed that Westinghouse (or what was formerly Westinghouse, anyway) did not put up its Christmas tree light display near the Parkway East Churchill exit. In another post, I said seeing that decoration brings a tear to my eye. Every. Single. Year. Well, Virginia, not this year, sadly.
  • Similarly, for the past 20 years, maybe more, I find myself missing the Sesame Street Christmas special that had Big Bird questioning Santa's existence. I still remember some of the words to "Keep Christmas with You" and I can picture someone ice skating to "Feliz Navidad" as well as an icicle on Big Bird's beak. Anyone else?
Well, it has been almost an hour since I have eaten something, so I better run. Or eat, anyway.

Merry Christmas some more!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What a year 2021 has been (Day 7)

I have almost no words for what happened yesterday at the Capitol. Protesting is one thing (though I truly think it is and has been time to move on). But to storm the Capitol? A friend on Facebook said, quite simply, " Almost 20 years ago a group of people on an airplane sacrificed themselves to protect the Capitol. How far we have fallen!" Indeed. And, yes, it IS storming the Capitol. I have seen numerous videos of people knocking down barricades/fences, pushing police officers, and breaking windows and climbing through them. That is beyond protesting. And even if a protestor did not do those things, if they followed those seditionists past those barricades and into the building, they are just as guilty. I did not support the violent protests this summer that resulted in damages to businesses and public property (I was in full support of the actual protests). But I also acknowledged as a white person, I cannot truly put myself in the position of a black person who is angry a
Post a Comment
Read more

Melancholy and Gratitude

 A few days ago, I decided to do gratitude posts on FB. I was good the first two days. Day 3 I got a little snarky as I posted about "doing the right thing" in regards to Covid. The Covid cases in Allegheny County have been on the rise. For a while, we had daily counts between 50 and 100. After July 4, we saw a spike for a few weeks, and then cases were back below 100. Unfortunately, other than one "low" day this week, where "only" 288 cases were reported, we have had between 500 and 620 daily cases. Fortunately, only a few people have died this week. But of course, any death is too many. I started to keep track of cases, deaths, and hospitalizations on 6/12/20. On that day, since 3/12, Allegheny County had had 2,034 cases, 352 people had been hospitalized, and 172 people had died. On 11/19/20, the county has seen a total of 22,042 cases, 1,724 people have been hospitalized, and 465 people have died from Covid since 3/12. In just over 8 months, we have had
Post a Comment
Read more

Hug your loved ones!

I hate to say that I am still working through my grief. I mean, in some ways I can imagine I will always be grieving. But I feel pretty confident it will get easier, and I will cry less and less. But, yeah, I guess I am still working through it. Yesterday, a thought occurred to me: I had not hugged my dad since the end of February, and that will now be the last time I ever did. I did not see him for almost three months because of COVID, and then at the end of May, he started his series of hospital visits with skilled nursing stints in between. I was always afraid to hug him then. What if I gave him COVID? And yet when my dad had really bad ICU delirium during a few different hospital stays, I fed him. If I could do that, why not hug him? So I cried a bit last night thinking about that. I am not necessarily a big hugger; I used to hate it, and then probably before Jordan was born, I got back to doing it again. Before COVID, I hugged my friends goodbye (and sometimes hello). I always wou
Post a Comment
Read more