COVID Christmas

 We set the time for 7am this year and the kids gave us a little window to wake up slow.

THEN HE CAME!  HE CAME!  SANTA CAME!!!

Claire and Oliver waited so patiently for Daddy and me to make our coffee (and Oliver's warm milk) and get the fire started.

Oliver loves his warm milk!

The kids took their time this year and decided that we should all take turns opening our gifts.  It worked out really nicely and we all enjoyed seeing what everyone got!

Then there was the hot mess aftermath!

After the madness we had a fancy breakfast!

Then a masked up visit from Nana and Papa to exchange gifts with them.  After they left Grandma and Grandpa masked up and stopped over too.

Oliver loved his new hockey bag!

After our visits we had another delicious and fancy dinner in the dining room and then we got cozy again and watched Mandalorian.   

I missed everyone so much. I missed the loud house with Christmas music blaring and everyone talking loudly.  I missed eating and laughing and taking pictures.  I missed seeing both sides of my family visiting and having fun. I missed being exhausted when everyone left.  I missed doing it all over again on Christmas day.  It stinks that it had to be this way, super stinks.  Like cry in the shower (again) stinks.  But, I watched my kids both days and they both still laughed and had a blast.  Oliver still ran around excited counting down the days. Claire and Oliver still loved picking out presents for family and wrapping gifts. Santa still came and made the kids happy. Even though we didn't get to see our whole family (and that crushed me), we still got to see some of them.  It was wonderful and calm Christmas. One we will definitely never forget.  And I am grateful for the cozy, calm holiday with my little family.  This too shall pass and I will always remember that we made the best of an awful situation!

COVID Christmas Eve!!!

 

To say that I was sad that I couldn't have our usual Christmas Eve party is an understatement.  I was devastated and heartbroken, like soul crushingly heart broken.  But I did what any good Mom does, I cried it out in the shower and then did my best to make a really crappy situation as good as I could!

After not sleeping and checking the weather 678 times we set up the pop up tent in the driveway, set up some hot chocolate and chili in the garage, and built a fire outside.  Then we invited a few family members and friends over to say a quick Merry Christmas!  Even we couldn't have our usual party, at least we could say, "Merry Christmas" and quickly exchange gifts safely. 

And guess who still made a special appearance?!  SANTA! He must have known we were outside ;)

Everyone masked up and got a chance to still tell Santa what they want for Christmas (although we skipped the lap sitting).

Oliver loved showing off his Santa mask!

And we just happened to have a chair for Santa to take a load off and visit with the kids!

Then Santa brought out his book for names for the naughty and nice list and played a dicey little game of finding all of the kids names!  Everyone was on the nice list, thank God (even though they spelled Giada's name wrong).

Santa still had presents for the kids!

And we still got our usual picture!

Not the usual pics but still pretty great!

We all loved seeing Santa! 

After Santa left everyone headed home and we set the table for a nice quiet but fancy Christmas Eve dinner.

Root Beer always tastes better out of a fancy glass.

After dinner we cleaned up and put on our jammies!

Then we got nice and cozy to watch our favorite Christmas movie!  After Mickey we all watched the Muppet's Christmas Carol for the first time together and decided it was a new favorite!!!  After a wonderful evening we all headed to bed to wait for Santa!

A Little More Christmas

Of course Cozy came back this Christmas season and brought us some fun Christmasy things!

We loved making our gingerbread houses this year!  We had so much fun putting them together.

Normally we make our Christmas cookies with the Cappellis but this year we had to make our own.

We all had fun making them!

Claire had a really great time putting on my glasses and acting like me!

We had a little incident at the Dollar Tree which led me to keeping their basket and Claire had field day with that!

I must say, our cookies came out delicious!

And we all had fun decorating them!

We saved our annual "Drive Around and Look At Christmas Lights" tradition for after Christmas.  And I am actually super glad that we did because we had tons of snow!

Cozy even got to stay an extra night so that she could come with us!

Oliver was beyond thrilled to take her around with us!

We loved the lights this year.  Our usual "Music lights" house didn't do it this year but we found this gem in East Aurora and it was awesome!

So even though our traditions all had to be altered, we still had fun and made the best of it.  I can't say it enough, my kids have been so resilient during this time and I am so proud of them!