Merry Christmas from Anna and Long Cat!

We had such an awesome Christmas, and if this blog is serving as my memory book, that is what I want to remember. Christmas was awesome.

Just look at how great it was! David got a balaclava! (He also does a thing that he got from Tom — he immediately puts his gifts to use. That’s why he’s wearing his new balaclava in this photo and in later photos he’s wearing his new robe, new pajama pants, new balaclava, and starting his new book series.)

Mary had a full Taylor Swift-mas. Taylor books, ornaments, and the thing I was most excited about, this Eras Tour sweatshirt.

Thomas got Tears of the Kingdom!

He also made a fort of presents around himself.

Anna got a new hat with her name on it!

Tom got Sriracha!

And there it is in a fewer-than-200-words-nutshell: the Kriegers had a great Christmas!

 

But let’s zoom out a bit, eh?

The Christmas season is always busy, but this year felt uniquely harried for me. I never felt caught up, and I still can’t exactly figure out why. There wasn’t anything different about this year that would make it especially busy. My knitting orders always take up a bunch of time, but that’s not new. Was it that Tom ran a marathon, or the bump in school performances and field trips? Honestly, the only REAL new thing is my schedule — for the first time all of my kids were in school. Could the problem have been expectations? Perhaps the frustration was that I expected to have all this time and it never materialized.

Whatever it was, I was scrambling all season. Our house was never fully decorated, I never got to make any fun Christmas treats, and on Christmas Eve I still had a lot of wrapping to do.

Then, on the morning of Christmas Eve when I still had a lot of wrapping to do and a lot of cooking to do, David started to feel poorly. Pretty quickly, on the advice of my arsenal of medically inclined friends, we realized that he needed to go to the doctor.

Long story short, David was struggling to breathe and exhibiting some symptoms that we thought we left behind years ago. Since I’ve never been one to pass up a truly saccharine line, I’ll say this: my Christmas gift is the support I got from my friends and the incredible doctors, nurses, and pharmacists who were all so helpful and kind on one of the worst days of the entire year to be at work.

I imagine them all looking at their work schedule the moment it was posted — “UGH! I can’t believe it! I’m scheduled to close on CHRISTMAS EVE!” 

They were all great. Christmas elves and angels in real life.

And now comes the point in this narrative that I’m tempted to wrap this story into a pretty (Christmas!) package. I was so busy! Then all of my time got swallowed up by an emergency! That’s when I realized what’s really important! Family! Health! Being together!

Perhaps.

Maybe that’ll be the lesson in hindsight, once my decorations are put away and we’ve gone to a few follow-up appointments.

For now there is no lesson except — WOW. Christmas really packs a punch, doesn’t it? So many expectations, field trips, performances, expectations. Whoops, did I say that one twice?

That’s my lesson, my tidy little essay about Christmas with the encouraging takeaway: we did it, we made it.

Christmas is a lot, but we did it. We got through. And lest you be tempted to forward me an Instagram post about simplifying the season , please know that I truly did try to clear my calendar of breathing difficulties but yet here we are.

In the past few months my blogging has taken a nosedive. I’ve been bummed about that because I love blogging. I love it for a lot of reasons, but the main reason is that I know I’ll forget all this stuff. In time, so much fades. We forget the cute things our two-year-old used to say over and over,  and that bedtime song we sang a million times. We even forget urgent care visits that turn Christmas Eve upside down.

With that in mind, maybe I shouldn’t blog about it. Maybe we should let this one fade away into our subconscious. Let’s forget the busyness and the overwhelm, because I think that might just be a part of this stage of life. Let’s especially forget that David’s resting heart rate was 200 bpm on Christmas Eve. 

Maybe we should just let all of those memories drift away into a kaleidoscope of Christmases and keep the memory that rises to the top: Christmas 2023 was awesome. It was, it really was.

How could it not be, Anna got a Long Cat!