Leave it to my little sister, an exceptionally gifted host. If there’s a way to have a good family time in the face of masks and social distancing, she’s the one who would find it. And she did.

My sister, fourth of the five of us, flew in from an undisclosed location with two masks (one a KN-95) and a face-shield on so she’d be relatively assured, for my mom, that nothing, let alone COVID, could get near her.  We drove down to my sister’s house Christmas Eve and decided there would be no eating so we could keep our masks on at (almost) all times. 

We got my mom her first smart phone for Christmas and spent the first couple of hours getting everything set  up for her.  When it was all said and done, we dropped her land line, put her on our plan, took her from 1G of data to unlimited, and saved her $50 a month.  Once that was out of the way, my sister, fifth of five and our hostess, pulled two buzzers out and placed one on either side of their pool table… she then pulled out several poster boards with numbered rectangles on them numbered 1 thru 8 and announced we’d be playing Family Feud.

For the purpose of the game, she literally surveyed 100 people and put the top six to nine answers on poster boards with the answers covered by the numbered rectangles.  Two other rectangles were taped to the wall, each having three little Velcro dots meant to post the “x’s” for wrong answers.  She’d prepared five rounds.  Teams pitted family against family, and it was a laugh-a-minute riot.  We were real careful how we laughed, though.  Ahem.

And I got to see my nephew-dog, Augie… Augie and I are buds.  

We spent a bit more than a few hours with the family and headed home, picking up pizza on the way for an easy dinner.  The party wasn’t the normal full dinner affair, but nobody was going to keep us away from each other during Christmas.  However, we didn’t want to push our luck with my mom, either.

Christmas Day was spent in our pajamas the entire day except the hour my wife and I spent on the trainers to justify our supper – non-traditional, bacon barbecue burgers with onion rings and my eldest daughter’s most impressive mac and cheese.  I napped four times throughout the day, catching up on sleep I’d deprived myself of back in 2005.  It was a fantastic couple of days.  Not traditional by any stretch, but by 2020’s standards?  It was a homerun.