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This Christmas vs Last Christmas
Why I think last year was easier
Last year’s Christmas was probably the strangest Christmas any of us had ever had. We were in the first lock-down of our lifetimes. Traveling was supposed to be limited, if done at all. Many people refused that idea and traveled anyway, and many of those people aren’t with us any more.
We ordered gifts on line instead of going out doing that traditional Christmas shopping in crowded malls and local stores. I vaguely remember doing all my Christmas shopping in one day, going from store to store, finding just the right gift for each person on my list. For that one year, we thought, we had to give that up and rough it.
Instead of the usual big family get-togethers, we stayed in with the people we live with. My kids and I exchanged gifts outside my front door days before Christmas. We did risk hugs, but we were careful not to breathe on each other.
It was a new experience, and I think the sense of novelty made it what we thought would be a once in a lifetime event. We’d had an election, and surely things would be better in 2021.
Enter 2021. It started right off with a terrorist attack on the Capital Building that we all watched on TV. It was a blatant attack on our democracy, something else we’d never seen in our lifetimes. But the…
