A new Christmas tradition?

We had a quiet Christ­mas… There is some­thing to be said for the sim­pli­city of this year: hav­ing no expect­a­tions, the free­dom to do whatever we felt like at any giv­en moment.

We used to have some pretty rigid Christ­mas tra­di­tions in my fam­ily… Things that were done the same way every year. Once my dad died things star­ted to change. The fol­low­ing year my mum died, and they changed again. And then each year we began to cre­ate new tra­di­tions. As a res­ult we find ourselves open each year to some­thing new. “What can we do that’s dif­fer­ent this year?” is an excit­ing thought, rather than a dis­tress­ing one.

This year then, we real­ised was our first ever Christ­mas with just the two of us. Even before kids, we were always at my folks’. So this was refresh­ing. I set up an All Day vir­tu­al meet­ing, so we could watch while we opened each oth­er­’s gifts, and through­out the day if the kids wanted to chat for whatever reas­on we could just pop online. Very cas­u­al. We got take-out tur­key din­ner from Pat­ina, which we picked up the day before, so when we were hungry and felt like eat­ing, which happened to be at 2:30 in the after­noon, we heated it up and ate. Matt felt like mak­ing a cheese­cake, so he made a cheese­cake. We had tunes going all day. We played Skip-Bo for ages and chat­ted and laughed. We quite liked it, and I won­der which of these we’ll hang onto, even when we are able to be in com­pany with our fam­ily and friends again.