Have yourself a merry covid Christmas

January 03, 2021

Have yourself a merry covid Christmas

I had a feeling in June that Levent and I would not be traveling anywhere for Christmas this year. And sure enough, after lots and lots of tears (on my end, as well as one panic attack), we made the very hard decision to just stay in Kansas for the holidays.

As covid cases continued to spike and with Levent working in retail, we did not feel like we could safely travel and then spend time with our parents.

By the beginning of December, I could actually talk about this without crying. Not seeing my sister in 2020 was extremely hard.

But here we are living, despite it all. (Thanks Rupi Kaur)

Even though we weren't doing anything fun, I made the decision to use some of my vacation days (instead of letting them all roll over in the hopes that we can do fun things again soon-ish). With weekends, it ended up being 11.5 days in a row of not working. It was wonderful. True, I did get a bit bored mid week but that has more to do with the fact that it's been hundreds of days since we've been sheltering in place.

Because I was not going to be working for 12 days of "Christmas" I tried to keep a 12 days of Christmas gratitude list, but stopped after day 5. Around then, Levent went back to work and my daily things were starting to be the exact same things. I mean that's fine. But not very interesting if you're hoping to eventually find a fun way to blog about a holiday and a pandemic. It worked though in that I have a few things from the holidays that I really enjoyed. Here are a few

1. We took Tito to the dog park a lot (which is pretty normal) but someone left a soccer ball there and we learned how much this pup loves playing soccer. It was so cute.

2. We ate a lot of yummy food. And most of the time, we ate it while watching the latest season of the Great British Bake Off. Levent watched it with me and that filled me with so much joy.

A Turkish Brunch on Christmas morning

3. Other things we watched while eating yummy food: The Lord of the Rings trilogy. We watched the theatre version for the first movie and then watched the extended versions for the next two. This allowed us to watch this saga over the course of 4 days instead of just 3. (We spilt the last one up into two different evenings). I still love those movies as much as ever and it was fun to revisit them.

It's a Miller family tradition to eat pizza by the tree on Christmas Eve. So we had our Christmas Eve pizza while kicking off LOTR. (We got frozen pizza from the Public at old town in Wichita and baked it at home. Yum).

Christmas dinner

Caramel pecan cheesecake for dessert

4. One Christmas Eve, we sat down at 10pm and started a puzzle. We didn't get up until we finished it, at 1am. We really went after it.

5. On the Sunday after Christmas, I read a whole book in a day. It was delightful (mostly because the book was so delightful. Check out The Midnight Library).

6. I've gotten really into baths again this winter. (I've been having a lot of pain again lately and they help). And over the holiday break I took a lot of them.

7. One evening I saw the Levent was doing something very unusual; he was playing with the filters on snapchat. So of course I joined in. He makes me laugh so much.

8. As per usual, New Year's Eve was a bust. I was super depressed and went to bed at 11. But once again I was reminded that New Year's Eve is the worst but not to worry because New Year's Day is wonderful. We woke up to a winter wonderland. So we took Tito to the dog park because that pup loves himself some snow. It's so fun to watch. We ended up getting 4 inches of snow. (I know because I took a ruler out into the yard at one point). We hardly ever get that much snow at once.

New Year's Eve mood

New Year's Day mood

Snow day breakfast after playing at the park

Overall, it was a nice Christmas. It was fine. We did our best to make the most of it I think.

Really, I should mention how much fun I had finding vintage ornaments when I decided to kick the home Christmas decor up a notch. I went to this antique store I love in Wichita twice and found some really great pieces. In true COVID shopping fashion, I also went to Target and just let myself by whatever I wanted (in terms of Christmas decorations). We even went for a real tree this year that we bought from a local boy scout troop. I am really glad we did. It made the house feel way more cozy.

Like last year, I signed up for a wreath making workshop from a Wichita florist. This year it was virtual of of course. But I had a fun time making it on my porch. I even used the leftover pieces to make a garland.