[Dutch Lock Down Day Two Hundred Eighty]
Finished wrapping presents this morning.
Placed everything in its place.
Bought the ingredients for the three dishes I’m making for tomorrow night’s dinner.
We opened stockings tonight and tomorrow morning we’ll attack the big presents – this wasn’t in the plans, but COVID shifted things a bit.
Want to hear the plot hook?
But first the news:
- Negative test result mandatory for all plane passengers to NL from December 29
- RIVM: 11,555 test positive for coronavirus; Slightly above 7-day average
- How to host a COVID-proof dinner this holiday season
Picking up kids from daycare today at 1800:
“Tomten’s the Swedish gnome who brings the big presents on Christmas Eve, yeah? And American Santa Claus brings the stockings on Christmas Day, right? Well, we’ve been home all day and NOTHING’s arrived. So let’s go investigate what happened, yeah? We should’ve at least seen Tomten, but we haven’t. And we don’t have any gifts. And the stockings are empty. What do we do?”
Now, the six year old immediately starts to fuss a bit, so I dial it back to hopeful:
“We’ll figure it out! Let’s go look up where Tomten and Santa are on the tracking systems. Don’t panic. We can do this!”
The stockings were hung immediately inside the door when we got home on THEIR OWN low coat hooks, so we just opened the door and waited.
The oldest saw them and knew, “Wait, WHAT ARE THESE?!?”
“Oh, SANTA dropped off the STOCKINGS!! ! But what about TOMTEN? What about the BIG gifts?”
And then they saw the tree with all the presents underneath and we laughed and laughed and laughed. They weren’t allowed to open anything, though, until they ate their dinner and I have never seen those three INHALE food so quickly, but they did.
And then they brought their stockings into the kitchen to open them while I cooked dinner for P and I. The kitchen is now trashed.
After dinner, P took kids to bed while I prepped the first half of the pumpkin pie and candied yams and cooked the cranberry sauce and as I was peeling sweet potatoes, an absolutely delightful calm came over me – I was aware that I am looking forward to tomorrow. To opening the presents. To watching the kids and P open their presents. To having two friends over for dinner. To finishing two dishes for tomorrow night’s super fancy schmancy but plenty of space between adults because of COVID dinner.
To have myself a merry little Christmas.
I’m starting to think that procrastination leads to all that super stress I’ve got going on in my life and maybe doing things ahead of time is Not So Bad ™.
BWAHAHAHA NAH!
But it is something to think about.