My 8th and 9th Covid-19 Tears

I shed my 8th Covid tears on Christmas Eve and my 9th were on Christmas Day. I did not see Sean on Christmas Eve which was so different from what our Christmases have been for the past 19 years.

The whole Christmas season was so strange for me that I think it kind of calminated over the past two days and resulted in my tears. Normally, the traditionally started with Sean when he was 11 or 12 and we lived in our house. I told him one Christmas Eve as we got home from my Mom’s family’s hall party that if he stays awake long enough on Christmas Eve, Santa will come and it is technically Christmas Day so we could open presents then. Sean would go to his room and read a book or something while I got the presents ready.

I did that because I did not want to sleep in my contacts (like I always did because I broke my glasses years ago) and I didn’t want to wake up early in the morning as my disease was setting in unbeknownst to me.

Sean would open his presents and we would leave all of the wrapping paper and boxes in the living room and go to sleep. We then would wake up on Christmas morning, put all the wrapping paper in a garbage bag, and I would save the boxes (because my Mama didn’t raise no fool) and we would go see a movie before we went to eat dinner at my Mom’s house.

This picture predates those Christmas memories and it is from our second apartment’s Christmas. We had three Christmases there before I bought our house but finding this picture just in time for throwback Thursday:

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really made me miss him on Christmas Eve! I cried about that because we would not be staying up past midnight to open his presents and things were so different now! Because of my tears, my Mom set this up on my desk beneath the TV to make me feel better:

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I did not see Sean until the evening of Christmas day and it was NOT normal. He sat on the loveseat as I sat on the other end of the room in the doorway to the hallway. We all were masked up and he appreciated everything he got. He told me that he wanted to give me a hug after each present but that’s just not how things are right now.

I cried at the vast differences on Christmas day too and will be happy when things return to normal. In the meantime, I have a book to read that Sean got me for Christmas!