Happy Christmas, Pandemic Style

We are blessed with a huge extended family pretty local to us, so Christmas usually involves a lot of visiting across many counties. The pandemic has spread through every state, and there are no longer places with low transmission. The good thing is that treatments are better and several vaccines are starting to be distributed...an end in sight for COVID-19! However, the health care system is pretty overwhelmed at the moment. You aren't supposed to gather with people outside of your household, so we had to change a lot of our usual traditions. We are still having fun and making the best of it. 

Usually, Laurel and I kick off the holiday season by caroling with the Girl Scouts. In the past we have gone door to door in our neighborhood and to a nursing home. This year we made greeting cards and craft kits for our local food pantry to distribute with their Christmas food boxes. We aren't currently having an in-person scout meetings, so we met on Zoom with our troop, while we each decorated cards and made kits. It was actually a lot of fun. Our troop decided to use some of their money from the fall nut/magazine sale to donate to the food pantry since we probably can't go to winter camp this year, and they also started to organize a coat drive. Our scouts always have big plans!

For the past 5 or 6 years, we have gone to the Four Frozen Farmers Christmas tree sale, but they canceled their sale this year. Instead, we upcycled an artificial tree my neighbor was tossing. I pulled off all of the lights, which weren't working anyway, and cleaned it off and fluffed it up. It looks beautiful!

We couldn't do our usual celebrating with my parents, but we lucked out with some amazingly warm and sunny weather and had a campfire in their front yard and ate on the porch. We made a craft wreath by outlining each of our hands and pasting them on a piece of cardboard. The kids decorated their Christmas tree and we exchanged gifts on the porch. My mom even got a pretty good family picture of us!

We did a quick drop-off-presents kind of visit with M's family and on Christmas Day, we did a video call with them. Luckily, his parents and sister live near each other and are already podded up, so nobody was alone for Christmas.

Instead of visiting my extended family, we are going to do a massive video call with everyone. This is kind of cool, actually, because it will include some relatives that are usually too far away to be there in person. My aunts even organized advance delivery of the traditional Christmas poppers, which we will "pop" during the call and then somehow try to get a screenshot of all of us wearing our crowns. 

We did something kind of different with my brother and sister-in-law. It was way too cold that day for standing outside and visiting so we went on a car tour of holiday lights in his neighborhood. I printed out bingo cards with themes to look for and we put our phones on speaker so we could talk the whole time. We had a great time! It was snowing so everything was really pretty. 

We still celebrated with our next door neighbors, since we already have a lot of contact with them, but we opted not to eat anything together and we always wear masks anyway. We did crafts and exchanged gifts. I made my usual holiday version of Tic-Tac-Toe (Tic-Tac-Snow, lol), and holiday charades cards and my neighbor organized a candy cane reindeer craft and the most adorable mason jar lanterns with these really cool solar lights on the lids. 

It's been a lot more sitting around in our pajamas and reading books this year. I lost weight, exercised more, drank less alcohol and slept enough almost every night. We shifted into full "unschooler" mode for Christmas break. This means that I don't require any particular study or schedule but I log things the kids do that meet academic standards. For instance, we got a game called Sumoku that provides plenty of addition and multiplication practice. Reading books is another obvious one to track. They also keep up with Duolingo on their own (gotta keep the streak going). The kids feel like they are on a break, but never stop learning.

So, all in all, it has been a weird but still pretty fun holiday season.