Our 2020 Christmas

Here is our little tree, with our now-snowy little village. The little cottonball snowmen have gained faces and buttons since I took this picture, but no arms yet. I’m not sure why the tree is leaning, it wasn’t at first. It’s not anything to do with unbalanced weight of the plethora of ornaments, thought they do nearly overwhelm this tiny tree.

My husband and I have a tradition of just doing stockings at home with our son along with a couple wrapped gifts for him. We typically include favorite candies for each other in the stockings and occasionally other little gifts, like my husband got me this retro-style addition of Uno this year, one of my favorite games, or like some kind of toy, art supply, or book for our son in his.

We typically open our stockings together on Christmas Eve, but this year we opened them the weekend before. All the rules and regular traditions are out the window this year, anyway, and our son was so impatient to see what was in his, as well as have us see the drawings he’d made for each of us in ours.

My husband had both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off from work, and though we didn’t go anywhere for Christmas this year, a few grandparents and friends made sweet drop-offs of gifts for our son (and a few for us, too!) on Christmas Eve. We spent the afternoon watching a few Christmas Mickey Mouse shows with our son, and later we went out and grabbed to-go from a local favorite thai curry and sushi restaurant.

On Christmas Day we did a drive-by holiday food and present pick-up from my mother-in-law and stepfather-in-law’s. We ate that food for lunch and opened the presents over video call, then made Hawaiian roll roast beef Italian sliders for dinner – not a typical Christmas dinner, but a meal my husband and I had both been looking forward to the whole week and so yummy.

We spent those days and the rest of the weekend sleeping in (which our son sort-of lets us do now) and helping our son put together various toys and gifts – of which he got some pretty cools ones, like a wooden train whistle, a simple machines making kit, a pirate sword, and a build-your-own-rocket kit, along with some new books.

I know there’s nothing profound in this post, but after this long weekend, I wanted to write about it to remember. Just spending time with my husband and son in our own little bubble for these few holiday days, finding and making our own little moments of happiness and joy with pepperings of blessings from friends and family like unexpected gifts and caring texts. It was just such a nice, peaceful, joy-giving thing in the crazy year of stressful, scary things.