We're having a Covid Christmas

Even with a month of lockdown, we still have high numbers of Covid cases.  Thus we have had our lockdown continued until Jan 8.  This means no Christmas or New Year’s parties.  They did open up sales on Christmas items though.

We had already ordered most of our gifts and all but a couple have already arrived.  We’re not going to get together with family like we normally do.

This means that we will be cooking Christmas dinner for the first time since we’ve married.  It will be more of a low-key affair as will the gifts.  My wife has a tendency of picking up a lot of little items to bulk out the gifts.  With everything being locked down, she hasn’t been able to do that.

She usually takes off the Fridays in December and I take off the first Friday and we usually hit the mall and pick up the last of our Christmas shopping and check out the decorations.  That wasn’t even an option this year so we spent the day getting ready for the Christmas baking.  Even with that, because we aren’t going to be going out as much, she scaled back the types of deserts to a more reasonable amount.

It’s already going to be a bit odd as I won’t have the week between Christmas and New Year’s off.  For the last several years I have taken it as my holidays but, in order to ensure I got the time off to go to my daughter’s graduation this year, I had to book that first instead.  Even though her grad wasn’t quite what we were expecting, I’m glad I was able to be there for what we did have.  I did manage to get the week following New Year’s though.

Actually, because of how they restructured our holidays, I will end up with 9 weeks off in 2021 instead of the 6 weeks that I normally get.  I will also get another 4 weeks that I have to use by the end of 2022 in addition to my regular holidays for that year.

This also means that we will be cooking Christmas dinner for the first time since we’ve been married.  We won’t make the number of dishes that my mother usually makes but it should be a nice quiet dinner.  She usually has a big crowd show up on Boxing Day for chicken soup.  That will also be quite a change.