Grateful just to be here is always a fine start.
Our Christmas 2021 season is even more enjoyable than usual, a lot of it having to do with me not trying so hard to like it. Also, and most critically, I’m getting a handle on mourning my dead and lost. It’s taken me 60 years, but as I’m saying about a lot of things these days, it’s better late than never.
My children may or may not make it here, depending on how bad that weather system blowing through on Christmas Eve affects travel. If they don’t show, I’m prepared to accept that. This alone is a tremendous development. As if I already didn’t have enough to be grateful to God for, this strange, almost alien sense of personal serenity and maturity I enjoy now is making everything more manageable.
A lot of this attitude is a product of that most transformational month of November, when my wife and I came down with that version of the 11-Day Flu, as someone I know aptly described it. I got the anti-parasite treatment and managed to avoid the worst of the effects, but my wife’s asthma precluded her use of Ivermectin, and she suffered for it. After two trips to hospital emergency rooms and a lot of time camped on the living room sofa, she got a case of post-COVID pneumonia and will be sleeping with an oxygen unit the middle of January.
I may or may not write at length about this adventure later. The point is that we’re sincerely glad to be here. The COVID outbreak that swept the San Luis Valley last month was sudden, severe, and an actual pandemic, as opposed to the one last year that affected all of three people I knew, with the major fatalities being our personal bodily autonomy, our freedom to assemble, our freedom to travel, etc., and the economy. No one I know who’s survived last month’s lab-engineered plague is thinking of trading their hard-won natural immunity for the so-called vaccination, though. We already know the vaccinated did not suffer any less for their virtue. I know of one who died.
With help from our church and the grace of God we got through, and a Christmas some won’t get to see is just days away. Unlike this year’s Thanksgiving, I’ll be able to smell the cooking. I’ll drive up to see my grown children in January if they don’t make it down here for Christmas—Lord willing, of course, and the passes out of the valley don’t close. However this happens, this all stands a chance of being Our Best Christmas Season Yet. To not be anxious about things, to be free and untroubled in a world that wants me forever angry and afraid is one of the greatest gifts most cannot even imagine.
The peace of our Christ has found us. Our science is settled. Keep checking your favorite major news outlet for the latest changes in yours. Just don’t hate us for being happy and for knowing things you refuse to understand.
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