Christmas 2020

Oh my god, have I done a lot of writing today! Never time for going to the theater on Christmas Day in the past, but with HBO Max's Christmas-Day release this year of Wonder Woman 1984, Shobhit had watched the original on cable recently and was eager to watch it, so we actually did that last night. I wrote my solid B review before doing anything else this morning. Well, okay, except for peeing, doing my exercises, feeding the cats and taking my morning pills. Then I wrote the review. The next thing I wrote was my requisite "Christmas in the Northwest 2020" email photo digest / travelogue—not that there was much in the way of travel involved, nor is there ever for Christmas. In any case, as usual it included 18 photos, and captions written for all of them, complete with hyperlinks all over the place. I did paste all of those captions back into the caption fields on their original Flickr pages, and just now I tagged just those 18 shots so I can group them all together, so if you want a lot more detail than what I share here, but was included in the email, just click that link and you'll be all set! (Side note: they way you see the photos listed there is generally in reverse-chronological order, so what you could do is click the last photo shown and then tab through to the left, although in each case you still have to scroll down a bit in order to see the captions.) So anyway. Christmas 2020 Roll Call! It's a very small number this year, and combines a Zoom video chat with the in-person visit at Dad and Sherr's house that was only with the two of them. 1. Dad
2. Sherri
3. Gina [Zoom only]
4. Beth [Zoom only]
5. Matthew
6. Shobhit
7. Nikki [Zoom only]
8. Cheyanna [Zoom only] Is that a record small number? Yes, of course it is. Usually what I share is the "Christmas Dinner Roll Call," and there was no Christmas dinner at Dad and Sherri's this year—only cookies and hot chocolate; and only four in attendance for that. Dinner was back at home in Seattle and was just Shobhit and me. But, since there was no big dinner this year, I'll count the full roll call for the holiday, both in-person and via Zoom, as this year's count—which is one less than the previously low record of 9 that came for dinner in 2016: 2011: 11
2012: 28
2013: 16
2014: 20
2015: 33
2016: 9
2017: 15
2018: 20
2019: 20
2020: 8 I have a feeling that numbers as high as 2014's 33 are a thing of the past even going forward, but I also feel pretty confident Christmas Dinner next year will skyrocket by comparison to 2020, both because 2020 was so low, and because by the holiday season in 2021 we're all going to be wanting to make up for the disappointments of 2020. I can tell you this much: as of Christmas last year, absolutely none of us could have imagined what the holiday season in 2020 was going to have in store for us. Anyway, all the limitations and restrictions aside, I had a very nice day yesterday. This year was another exception in that Shobhit and I usually exchange our gifts at home Christmas Eve morning before we head down to Olympia for Christmas Eve—I have no Christmas Eve Dinner Roll Call this year because there isn't one. In fact, this literally just occurred to me, that 2020 was probably the first calendar year in my entire life that I did not see my cousin Jennifer in person. I did see her via FaceTime for my Birth Week, but usually I go stay the night with her, and either I go visit her or she visits me in October or otherwise in the fall. But, whatever, we still have the future ahead of us! Anyway, I'm really digressing there . . . this year Shobhit and I actually did our gift exchange this year. As always, I made us a copy of the current year's themed calendar (2021 is photos from Australia), as well as the perennial special "Matthew & Shobhit" calendar, complete with 13 (counting the cover page) photos of the two of us together from the past year. About half of them are still photos of us from our trip to Australia. Those were the only truly noteworthy gifts I gave him; the rest were stocking stuffers, one of them something he had already seen before: the Christmas Tree ornaments we bought while in Australia: a koala and a kangaroo. And unfortunately that kangaroo has no pouch and looks far too much more like a lamb; looking at the photo again just now I started to think, hey wait, maybe it is a lamb, given how many sheep we learned are in Australia—except no sheep has a tail like that, so it's still definitely a kangaroo. The rest of Shobhit's stocking I filled out with a few items I got after walking to QFC right after getting off work on Christmas Eve: two large jars of red pepper flakes, and an 8-pack box of microwave popcorn, which I actually could not fit into the stocking and so I merely wrapped it as a stand-alone gift. He was happy with it! The rest of the stocking was filled with things Shobhit actually got for himself: a holiday bag of coffee from Starbucks, and a couple shot glasses of liquor. He also have himself and me, each, a $25 gift card for See's Candies, explaining that he thought we should just keep those until Valentine's Day. He felt it was better to do that than fill my stocking with sweets, which was the exact same approach I had for his stocking! We already had far too many sweet things over the holiday season otherwise, which was why I went searching for red pepper flakes instead. What I really wanted to do was get a giant bag of red pepper flakes in bulk and just fill out his stocking with that, but no nearby store is selling it in bulk. I could have tried Amazon had I thought of it earlier, but it was too late. Oh, well. My initial plan was to leave for Olympia late morning, but then Beth posted a Zoom Christmas hangout invite on the family Facebook group, scheduled for 11 a.m. I wanted to be able to join that call, and didn't think it made much sense for us to get to Olympia only to have Dad and Sherri want to be able to join the call, so I decided it better to wait until after the Zoom call. (I suppose theoretically I could have connected via my phone in the car while driving down, except I'd be relying on 4G rather than wifi, and the screen would have been a fraction the size. I think we made the right decision.) Shobhit decided to make potatoes and puris for our Chriatmas dinner; he made such a volume of it that there was no need, in the end, to make one of the vegetarian roasts alongside it—even though I currently have two of them, from different brands, one a sample sent to me by a broker. I'm thinking now that I'll make it for New Year's Eve dinner. Anyway, he worked on the potatoes, and particularly the puris, while we were on the Zoom call, the iPad propped on top of the coffee maker. A kind of disappointingly small number of people joined the call, although I guess it's understandable that others may have been busy with their own immediate-family Christmases. So those who joined were Dad and Sherri; Beth and Gina (the Zoom hosts, although Zoom did remove time restrictions even for free accounts on Christmas); Shobhit and myself, and then Nikki and her five-year-old, Cheyanna. Apparently TJ, who works at a group home for autistic kids, was working in the morning. Nikki explained she largely chose to join the call so she could make the Christmas Day announcement that she is expecting another child, apparently due in August. Sherri was so surprised and delighted she literally jumped in her hair and clapped her hands, kind of yelping in excitement. 2020 brought me four new grandnieces and grandnephews, doubling the number I'd had in 2019: this year alone, Brandi, Ricky, David and Alex all had babies born. Now we have one more on the way in 2021. I have kind of wondered whether Nikki would ever have another, given Cheyanna just turne five. Even Shobhit, who usually reacts dismissively to anyone contributing more babies to an already wildly overpopulated planet, especially if they have two or more kids already, reacted respectfully to Nikki's news, giving her credit for smart, long-term planning. The Zoom call lasted roughly an hour, after which Shobhit and I had some of the potatoes and puris; we even packed some of both to take to Olympia, at Sherri's request—she offered some of the French toast and blueberry breakfast casserole she'd made to us in return. Apparently she had thought she might share some of that with us in the morning had we come earlier; instead we brought it home as leftovers. It was shortly after 1 p.m. when we finally left the condo and headed for Olympia, stopping first at the Starbucks on Olive Way for a couple chai lattes, which added ten minutes to our ETA. Shobhit, who wanted to have no stress all day, asked me to drive, which I did both there and back. I said I would as long as he let me listen to Christmas music, and we had a deal. Traffic was heavier than I might have assumed but still fine; I did wonder if there might have actually been more Christmas Day traffic than usual this year, with many people, like ourselves, making a relatively short-range day trip rather than any longer visit anywhere. I sang along to Christmas songs and Shobhit actually spent part of the drive napping, our more usual roles reversed. Dad had hoped that if the weather permitted it, we would take a walk on a recently completed paved path near their house in Olympia. That got scrapped pretty early on, when the forecast for Friday got worse with each day approaching it. At least it wasn't blustery or very heavy rain; just wet and relatively cold—I dressed in layers, knowing we'd be spending the entirely of our visit on Dad and Sherri's covered back porch. And, we stayed and visited, really quite pleasantly, for about two hours, after having arrived right around 2:30. Dad told us he had measured to make sure our chairs were six feet away from theirs, but still just out of the way of getting wet with rain; Sherri left out sugar cookies and delicious hot chocolate (and Purell!) for us. Unlike when we visited them stopping by on our way to Long Beach in June, when we could sit further away in chairs just out in the lawn, since we were all under the roof of the covered patio we still all wore our face masks. We would take them off briefly, only to partake in the cookies or cocoa, or the group photo I took using the timer, seen below. When we were on the Zoom call, Sherri told Gina and Beth they were welcome to come by while Shobhit and I were there, and Gina said they probably wouldn't, but thanks for the invite. It's just as well, as there really is only space for four people at most, under these circumstances, on that patio. They told us Gina and Beth had come and visited with them for quite a while in the very same setup on their patio the night before, on Christmas Eve—when Gina and Beth usually have a bunch of friends over to their house for an annual Christmas Eve dinner—so Dad and Sherri got that as part of their Christmas experience this year, at least. When I brought up that Christmas wasn't canceled, it's just different, Sherri said they were still deciding to think of it as "just another day." It really makes them (and especially Sherri) sad not to be able to see their grandkids, and especially their great-grandkids, over Christmas. I get that, but there's still next year. From my perspective, at least, I'm proud of how this was another example of many, of how I managed to make the most of what I had to work with this year. As I said during that visit, "I'm having a good time!" The visit broke up pretty much once Sherri said she was just too cold and needed to go back inside, and Shobhit and I agreed we should really head back anyway (had we been visiting inside the house, we certainly would have been there later). Dad and Sherri did tell us that the "Oly Lightstravaganza" house not far from where they live, which we saw for the first time just before driving back home last year, still did their decorating this year, and the church across the street from them joined in the fun. So we went over there and I got another 11 photos of it, which I put into a separate, dedicated photo album on Flickr so I could create an albums collection of the two years I've gotten pictures of it. Speaking of that sort of attraction, Shobhit and I also spent part of Christmas Eve at this place in the Ravenna neighborhood that has apparently been going on for decades and I only just this year heard of it: "Candy Cane Lane," a stretch of street with maybe 20 houses super decked out in holiday decorations. When you look it up online the information given says you can drive through, but holy hell is the traffic getting up to and through it bad—we took the smart route and found a nearby place to mark on the street, then walked. This allowed for far better photos than I ever would have gotten from inside the car anyway. I got so many photos at that, I decided that needed its own dedicated photo album as well, putting my number of separate holiday season photo albums at ten once again after all, matching the record from last year! Given that this is 2020, that's pretty shocking—but also the result of how much effort I put into finding holiday displays this year. I even have a higher cumulative number of shots this year among the ten albums, 365, as compared to last year's 310! So anyway, between Christmas Eve and Chistmas Day, there are three separate photo sets, the links to which I will share here if you want to view them all on Flickr: Candy Cane Lane (30 shots, including the video clip at the top of this post) on Christmas Eve; Christmas Day (61 shots) which also includes several shots from the preceding week; and then the 11 shots taken at Oly Lightstavaganza. In the meantime, now that I have today alone written a movie review, a lenghty email with detailed captions on 18 separate photos, and this very blog post (not to mention some work I also did on both my "Top 20 Audio" and "Top 10 Movies" year-end posts coming later over the next week), I think I'm finally going to take a break from all this and have some leftover potatoes and puris for dinner. [posted 5:46 pm]