There's something about wearing matching holiday gnome pajamas

which puts you in just the right, festive mood. Only five of us this year celebrating, but that is one more than last year, so it feels like a win. Last year when there was no vaccine for us and no easily available covid tests and every day was scarier than the day before and there you were, Christmas morning, alone in the kitchen, weeping over Judy Garland's Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, where she says something along the lines of someday soon we all will be together but in the mean time we have to muddle through somehow. And we did that, 

muddle through somehow, I mean, and here we are now, in our matching holiday gnome pajamas, vaxxed and boostered and freshly tested, and for today, anyway, negative. That ten minutes though, anxiously eyeing the swab and the lines on the home-testing-kit tray, I am the Schrodinger's Cat of covid, both positive and negative, and how different this week will be if things tip one way or the other. The trick, I think, 

is to stay positive about being negative. Or maybe just let the idea go, once and for all, that we can control anything. For the record, we can't. I am loving these holiday gnome pajamas. For the first time in twenty five years I don't make the Christmas dinner. I don't even help. It's weird. And then it's slightly uncomfortable. And then I let that go too and I enjoy myself immensely. I want to write something funny, 

something moving, something honest, but I can't control my words either. They come or they don't. I wear the holiday gnome pajamas all day, even when I walk the dog around the neighborhood, which is funny, now that I think about it. Later, we face-time with family who can't be with us. Text and send pictures. One of my daughter's gifts is a Polaroid printer. You take a picture on your phone, and print it off on the printer and out comes a Polaroid photo, which we then take a picture of on our phones, which we then send to others. 

It's the five of us, sitting together in our holiday gnome pajamas, one snapshot of time before we stand up and go our separate ways again into the next moment and the next, muddling through somehow, but for now, this moment, we are here on a couch, in a picture, in a photo, on a phone

together