How to Have a Really Weird Christmas

Dec 10, 2020 by Jeanette Hanscome

As I prepare to offer some tips I can’t help wondering—after all that has happened in 2020, would we feel comfortable with a normal Christmas?

Define normal.

Plus we would be breaking the new stay-at-home order and putting people at risk.

As desperately as I want to do what we’ve always done—have a houseful of teenagers and young adults crammed into Mom and Dad’s living room and take the traditional cousins’ picture (“Look at Haley, sandwiched in there with all those boys.” “Come on, boys, smile.” “Kai, stop making that crazy face.” “Wait, now Dylan’s eyes are close.” “Ohhh. Take another one.”)—part of me would spend all of Christmas Day waiting for a meteor to crush the house.

Still, it’s SO SAD. My family has been a social bubble since those were allowed. Based on how much time we spend together we could almost be considered one household.

We’d planned to have small get-togethers throughout December.

Dad bought gingerbread houses at Costco, so the sisters and younger cousins could come over to decorate them. Today Kristy stopped by to take hers home.

Sherry suggested a pre-Christmas desserts-only tea, after so many years of eating a huge Christmas meal and being too full for the obscene assortment of cookies, pies, and See’s candy. Now we’ll all have to make our own desserts. Though it’s more likely that I’ll make them for everyone and drop care packages off on doorsteps. I’m the only one who likes to bake.

On Christmas night when everyone is over, I always read the Christmas story from my ginormous-print Bible before we open gifts. I guess we can set up a Zoom call for that, but it won’t be the same. I’m not sure if I can concentrate unless I’m sitting on the floor, surrounded by long teenager legs “because there was no room for her on the couch.”

And then there’s Christian, my oldest man-child. Last year he couldn’t come for Christmas because of work. This year he has to stay in Reno because of… well, you know.

Like everyone else, we’re making the best of it and accepting that this year will be different.

This week, I keep having flashbacks to the Christmas when I was 19. Mom had pneumonia, so we couldn’t go to Grandma and Grandpa’s in Turlock like usually. The relatives felt so bad that none of them got together. They postponed until February, when we got to be the only group in town with a Christmas tree still in the window, reading Luke 2: 1–20 and singing “Silent Night.”

On Christmas Day, Dad took Mom to Urgent Care for anti-biotics. I know we made a nice dinner and opened gifts at some point, but I mostly remember going to the video rental store, seeing a friend there and feeling bad for her having to work on Christmas, and watching movies. That night, a friend from the college group at church, invited me to his house because his parents had left to go on a trip. A bunch of friends from church were there as well, including a guy in a Petra t-shirt who kept staring at me and smiling. A little less than two years later, I married that guy.

It felt so strange to be at a friend’s house on Christmas night, drinking eggnog, watching Star Trek 2, and wondering why that guy in the Petra t-shirt was staring at me. But in a way it was also fun. I’d never been with friend on Christmas before, only family.

I don’t remember that Christmas being the worst ever, ruined, or even sad. It was just different.

I’m praying that we’ll remember this year in the same way.

Weird, but still nice.

Embracing the weirdness of it is our only hope of having a good day.

We plan to figure out some creative drive-by gift exchanges for Christmas Day and have the big get-together with the obscene selection of sweets in late January.

I’m sure we’ll watch movies, play games, and decorate something. Some families do puzzles, but in ours, where two-out-of-three of us siblings grew up without color vision, those are only a source of frustration. So no puzzles! Not even in “Things will be different this year” 2020.

Who knows, maybe we’ll really go for it and support a local business by ordering take-out instead of making a big meal. 

Maybe I’ll declare it payback time for Mom and Dad on Christmas Eve: they can open one present each if they recite a Bible verse or sing a song from one of their childhood Christmas pageants.

On Christmas night, I’ll read the Christmas story on the floor and Nathan will take up the whole couch and park his long legs right next to me, so at least something will feel the same.

Whatever happens, we will never forget it, just like we’ll never forget this year.

What are you planning for this very different Christmas 2020? How will you make it memorable in a good way?