Life in the Age of Corona

A Daily Diary

Friday, November 27th, 2020

It Is Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

Now that the Turkey feast is done and fridge is overflowing with left overs, Christmas is the next major event. We spend the day today preparing for same.

Ever since my first stint in the USA in 2001 I have developed a liking for having my own tree. Germans typically will not set up or decorate a tree before the 23rd at the earliest; most families only trim their tree on the 24th, which is a little hectic, given it is a half working day and people do last minute grocery shopping and so.

Since we typically spend Christmas at our family home with mum, and everyone else, we cannot adhere to German tradition when it comes to bringing in the tree, so we do it the American way. The day after the Turkey has been devoured in comes the tree.

We spend this morning rummaging through the ornaments, a few of which we parted with leaving them on the curb. They were taken even before we could post a curb alert!

What we thought we may use was left all over the living room carpet as we headed out to get the tree! We did test all the fairy lights for in- and outside before draping them around the shrubs. They all worked fine. Only once they were installed, they did not. So, on the way to the tree place we swung by Strosnider to pick up a couple extra. It is the same thing every year, half the lights in a string miraculously stop working and I really do not have the patience to find the faulty one, so of they went onto the curb. Maybe some else is willing to deal with these obnoxious things.

As always when we drive the tree home people stare and smile as the tree sits on the back seat and looks out of the roof. I think this is the second out of the five times we have bought a tree here when it is not pouring with rain. Rather it was somewhere around 18C and rather pleasant to be driving top down.

Once the tree had established itself in the living room, I made for the pool and EM set of with her friend A. to do god knows what.

Once everyone was back we began to trim the tree and I must say it looks quite lovely with our eclectic collection of ornaments collected from different parts of the world. By bringing it in today we get to enjoy it for two weeks.

Now I am sitting by the fire and am enjoying the feeling of Christmas in our home.

The Virus of course does not care about the seasons or festivities. It continues to thrive, more so as people gather indoors. New infections yesterday were surprisingly low with only 103k new cases reported, bringing the US total to 13.4 million of the global tally of 61.4 million.

Given the spread, I am rather anxious about our trip and have proceeded to order N95 masks, which have arrived. We will wear those during the flight and in addition use surgical masks on top of them while in airport buildings. I feel a little bad about this, firstly because medical staff have a greater need for them and secondly, they are terrible for the environment.

I much prefer our fabric face coverings and have used them to make fashion statements. We have Halloween masks, Thanksgiving masks, Christmas masks and New Year masks in addition to the normal assortment that is.