We didn’t do a full Christmas this year, and that was fine.
We’d had our gatherings before we left — the important ones. What we didn’t expect was the strange quiet of not going through the familiar steps for the first time. No shopping frenzy, no schedule, no last-minute anything. A mix of lonely and genuinely peaceful. I’m holding both.
To everyone back home who lived through the storms: I was watching from here, and it looked brutal. Days without power, storm after storm, and — if I understood correctly — no emergency declaration to bring in the extra support people needed. And then gas prices went up. I’ll leave my editorial commentary at that, except to say that Maritimers deserve better than to have a crisis treated like a billing opportunity.
Closer to home — up here, New Year’s preparations are underway, and what that looks like bears no resemblance to what I grew up with. More on that next post.
Our internet has been slow, which has made the usual check-ins difficult. For me, disconnection is more than inconvenience — it creates a low-level restlessness I can feel but can’t always explain. Connection matters. We’re working on it.
We’re here. We’re well. More soon.