Christmas 2021

 Joy to the World the Lord is Come!

Advent's season of preparation, was a solid reminder of getting our lives and souls in shape for Jesus's coming. Father Bill's weekly homilies restated his call for more personal prayer during Advent. By the lighting of the third week's candle I took it seriously. I deleted my Twitter account, which as of the past few months, I had been regularly sucked into for news updates and wasted hours on stress increasing posts, and I downloaded the Hallow App and scheduled some prayer reminders. 

With a more peaceful mindset, we got to the physical preparation for Christmas. We picked out a tree and got it decorated. Again this year Emma and Rachael's ornaments didn't go on and it felt a little empty. Rachael was able to come over and join us for a big cookie baking session. We made dozens and dozens of cookies, we listened to music, and chatted, and had a wonderful time. It looked and smelled like Christmas. We wrapped presents to send to Colorado and put them in the mail. Happily it didn't take long at the post office but boy had shipping prices gone up. Jim and I took an evening and did some shopping together. It was nice to have him around in the evening and weekends to do all of the holiday activities. Johanna got to be a reader at her 3rd grade Advent prayer service. We were doing all of these Christmas activities with our masks on and a rising worry about the pandemic.

Maryland's Department of Health was hacked and the COVID tracking info was off line from Dec 4 until Dec 20 when limited data became available. I felt like we were flying blind. The hospitalization numbers were still being updated daily and they were creeping up a little every day. A new variant, Omicron, was in the news and looming. Great Aunt Liz reached out about our Christmas Eve party the first week of December, asking if we could take extra steps to keep it safe. Aunt Liz has breast cancer and a heart condition and I was happy to do what I could to reduce risks. I reached out to my siblings, suggested getting Rapid at-home tests to take before coming over, and getting boosters or vaccines. I was really disappointed when I got push back from some of them. By the week of Christmas, the rapid tests were hard to find. By the 23rd hospitalizations were going up sharply. Aunt Liz, Theo, Kelly, Alfredo, and Lucia all decided not to come over. Then Henry canceled because he wasn't feeling well.

We got ready to host the smaller but still large crowd. Christmas Eve we woke up and took our rapid covid tests, we were all negative.

Families began to arrive. Joe wasn't feeling well so he didn't come over, but Aunt Magaly and their 6 kids came over to drop off gifts and to do the cousin family picture. We decided since the weather was mild that we would do the picture outside. We sent Los Jauquets home with food for the family after the picture. We had the house windows open, 2 air purifiers running, and we set up the front porch with plastic sheeting, a heater, and Christmas lights and blankets, so that everyone could spread out as we ate and visited.

The younger cousins did their gift exchange, the smaller numbers made everything go much faster. The older cousins did their exchange downstairs in the basement as was the tradition. And the adults had our white elephant exchange in the living room. My dad stole a giant tin sign of Wisconsin that Jim had added to the mix. We were glad to be together, but trying to be careful and many of us wore our masks when not eating. We were happy to trade some comfort for the gift of being together.

We did a quick clean up and then went to Mass at OLV. We were in the gym where Johanna was singing in the children's choir. They did a beautiful medley of "What Child is this?" with the Junior choir. Afterward we came home and then the girls headed off to feed their cats at their apartments. Emma drove the whole crew first to her apartment to feed Bean and then to Rachael's townhouse to feed Leia. Jim and I got some wrapping done while they were gone. We ate and then opened the gifts from Colorado before a reasonable bedtime. It was so nice to have them all under the same roof for Christmas. 

Christmas morning I was the first one up, and got the lights on and the coffee started before Johanna began her painstaking process of waking up each of her sisters. I got back to bed in time to wake Jim well before the girls came into our room. Each year we do the Christmas alphabet game, and before we started Rachael requested we speed run the game, saying we had prepared our whole lives for this. We all laughed, agreed and got to it. We all sang O Little Town of Bethlehem and then headed into the living room for gifts. We shared gifts and then shared breakfast. News of Covid began to trickle in. First it was Ed's dad, testing positive in the ER after the 10PM Christmas Eve Mass. The Kurek's would now be skipping Christmas Dinner at my Dad's.

We had a great easy day of family games and a video call with Jim's Mom, Dad, and brother. Then we headed over to my Dad's for dinner where it would just be us and Becky and Erik's family. As we enjoyed dinner and the cousins played a card game of spoons, we found out Lilian was positive from her test on the 23rd. Emma and Rachael went back to their own places that night and we went to bed with Covid creeping in.

On the day after Christmas, Erik tested positive and Ed was ill. Gradually over the next few days seven family members tested positive and a bunch more had symptoms and were told to presume they were positive too. Jim had cold symptoms and did most of his work over the phone. I had a raging headache and Emma felt yucky. Emma and I went to a testing center on the 27th and our PCR tests came back negative. But maybe... Rapid tests are not available for purchase anywhere and PCR tests have really long wait lines. The state has opened a number of mass testing centers again. We are all hoping that the Omicron variant will be less dangerous but it is spreading like wildfire and Delta is still around. the saddest part is that hospitalizations are overstressing our health care system.

The Christmas season continues and sadly so does this pandemic.