Decorated the house record early this year…this is most of it - there’s more to the left.

(Sunday Paper, Year V, Issue 48)

The Christmas song I referenced in the title of this post sure takes on a different meaning this year.

And I’m sure there will be a lot of people mentioning that fact now that we’re past Thanksgiving and in the unofficial official Christmas season…so I wanted to make sure I was among the first.

But as long as you change the emphasis of the idea of ‘home’, it’s certainly true.

Not unlike the different Thanksgiving we just went through (unless you took your chances and had your same ol’ Thanksgiving), Christmas is going to be different this year as well.

And that’s not entirely a bad thing.

I love my family, and I miss my family - let me make that clear.

Other than a pair of one-day, outdoor visits over the summer, we have not spent enough time together this past year, and that stinks.

But we’re lucky in our house - we’re not alone…we have each other, and we’ll be OK.

I understand that, and how difficult it is for many people.

But for me, there’s an appeal to having a different kind of Christmas.

It’s already started, considering the fact that I put the lights out on the house much earlier than usual - the weekend before Thanksgiving rather than the weekend after…or the one after that.

The decorations are going up inside the house, and - this is a shocker - Kathy even brought up the idea of getting a tree before I did, which is a first in our time together.

And then there’s Christmas itself: we usually drive down to New York first thing Christmas morning (well, second thing Christmas morning, I suppose). This year, we’ll have a relaxing Christmas Day at home.

There was a Christmas a few years ago or so when it snowed a bunch on Christmas morning - a true white Christmas.

We couldn’t drive that morning, so we waited a day before we headed down. It was relaxing and nice.

This year will be like that.

Of course, the difference is that year we saw my family the next day…this year who knows when that will happen.

But it will happen, and it will happen often, and we’ll make up for lost time then.

And this year, I’ll be home for Christmas…and I’ll also be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.

Notes

*If you think, because I have the lights up and we’re thinking about getting a tree, that I have my whole act together for Christmas this year…well, here’s something that shows you there’s still loose ends: I have no idea what we’re going to do about a Christmas card. We haven’t taken a nice picture of the girls all year (we do have one nice family picture for my ‘Family’ Christmas ornament display), and we’ve tossed around a couple of alternate ideas for this unusual year…but it’s obviously time to get that taken care of and we have no idea what we’re going to do.

*[Full disclosure: I feel I need to tell you that I wrote this earlier in the week and the update on Saturday night is that we got a tree on Saturday, and might have decided to use the family picture for the Christmas card. So it’s mostly taken care of…though the card piece is still a little up in the air.]

*Also Christmas-related, some of you may remember I went through almost all of the Christmas season last year without hearing my new (7 years old, anyway) favorite Christmas song - Kelly Clarkson’s “Underneath The Tree.” Well, this year has more than made up for it - I heard it multiple times even before Thanksgiving.

*Not that I’ve gone crazy for the before-Thanksgiving Christmas music. The girls and Kathy have been listening to it a lot, though, and whenever one of the girls is in the car with me they ask me to put on the Christmas station. So I let them have their fun. I’ll get more into it now, I’m sure.

*So many thoughts are swimming through my head as another year comes to a close. You can’t get in there, but the closest you can come is following my thoughts on social media: You can follow me on Twitter here, and you can Like the Facebook page here.

*I’m not sure whether “Every Week On Wednesday” will continue into 2021, to be honest, but I like the idea of forcing myself to throw something on the Facebook page every week. We’ll see if it evolves into something else in a month. I will, obviously, keep you posted.