And so this is Christmas, as the song says. It's a very different one for me. As I write this I'm alone, I have no place to go tonight (Christmas Eve) except to church later for midnight Mass, and tomorrow I'm joining two friends to go to an afternoon movie followed by dinner out. I have never had a Christmas like this before. No cooking, no baking, no multitude of visitors or going to people's houses, no traveling. I did have two visitors, however.
Sherry (Ed's daughter) and Jeremy (grandson), who live in St. Louis, visited this afternoon for about 1 1/2 hours; that was nice. Never fear, I haven't been a hermit. The days leading up to today have taken me out to places for shopping and, the last two nights, dinner out with friends. Sunday, December 20, was a really good day with my Hearts group coming over to decorate the tree (I did decorate the house this year), sing around the piano with me accompanying, and have lots of great food and drink and conversation and laughs. They are such dear people. Going back to last week, I worked on SAT essays Monday through Friday. For the long weekend of December 10-14, Melissa, Mark, and Will were here to help me celebrate my 60th birthday. That Saturday night, some of the Giesman kids and grands as well as a couple neighbors came over for birthday cake. While M & M & Will were here, we went to the Columbus Zoo to see the holiday lights that covered nearly every inch of the place, it seemed. Will also sat on Santa's lap--Santa just happened to be visiting the guard house at the entrance to my street. We got the platform out and set up the Lionel train (my first Christmas present when I was 11 days old), and as I expected, Will loved it. So of course we had to put the tree in place, too--which sat rather bare until my friends and I decorated it.
Despite all the activity in the past two weeks, it is very quiet in the house now. I've left all my gift wrapping chores go since the Giesman gathering won't be until January 1, here at the house, and our Christmas in Iowa will be sometime when I'm there January 7-12. I figured on filling the upcoming days with gift wrapping and preparing for the January events. Since I've gotten out only about half of the Christmas cards I usually send, I'll work on the rest of those Christmas morning. (Better they get out late than never.)
So it's a different Christmas this year. Not awful, just different. Kinda takes some getting used to.
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