There’s no way a gift bag, fancy wrapping, ribbons, or a bow would hide that this year, I felt stretched thin enough that I simply slapped traditional veneer on the right spots heading up to the holiday. So what we were doing kinda looked outwardly like appropriate festivities, but the feeling didn’t quite reach into my own emotional epicenter. That part of me just wanted two weeks of sleeping in delivered under the tree (whether it was wrapped or not) and didn’t really care how it looked on the outside to anyone else.
Andy was the first person to get sick last week. I doubt it came from his job, because he’s having to mask up there. More probable those germs became unwelcome holiday stowaways on one of the many errands he had run that week. Tony was the second person to become ill, and by Sunday, he had a fever of 104.6. At that point I knew there wasn’t any sort of sparkly spackle I’d feel like pulling out of my system to make something that looked like a holiday dinner…so I asked everyone how they felt about ordering pizza on Christmas eve.
I was glad Andy and Hannah were cool with that when I started feeling under the weather on Monday. Tony hates pizza because of the mixed textures and wasn’t wanting to eat much anyways, so we were just focusing mostly on hydration for him. My symptoms were milder than either of theirs, but still I skipped the makeup for 2 days and my system still feels less than Joy to the World even if the skin is glowy as it battles off the rest of the crud. Wasn’t flu, wasn’t COVID, we’ll just call it the gift of the Christmas germs, viral edition…since a whole bunch of people we know are also sick right now too.
Tony’s still sleeping a few hours during the middle of the day which is nowhere near his normal. And even though the version of this I experienced is much more mild, I’d like to be napping right along with him, so…I am going to leave this post with wishing all of you a wonderful New Year and the notice that I am giving myself the post-Christmas gift of at least two weeks off of writing posts here.
