Christmas last year was busy, and the frenetic pace has continued through the early months of 2023—hence the relative lateness of this collection of holiday photos.

For us, the holiday season started just after Thanksgiving, when we visited the San José Women’s Club to decorate gingerbread houses, as has been our tradition for the last several years. We even enticed Julia to come along, along with Grandma Flack, who was spending her first Christmas here in California.

Around mid-month, we decorated the first of our two Christmas trees for the year. This one was our own family tree, using the ornaments and lights we’ve accumulated over the years. It’s starting to get a little wobbly after about twenty-four years of service, but it survived another holiday; we’ll see how it’s doing next December.

We decorated the second tree on Christmas Eve using Grandma Flack’s family ornaments. This was our first natural tree in many years, but since Julie was planning to stay home through the holidays—more on that in a bit—it seemed like a good year to have one. With our tree in the family room and the Flack tree in the living room, our house felt very festive indeed.

As pandemic restrictions have eased, certain customs have returned after a prolonged absence. Among them: in-person, indoor musical performances at school. We had two of these this year. The first was a concert of holiday songs put on by William’s class. As you can see in the pictures, Will, always happy to put on a show, wore his favorite winter gloves, which feature puppets on the end of each finger.

The second performance was a band concert at UPA. For this show, Joe picked up a new instrument, the soprano saxophone, to play certain parts, though his primary focus remains the clarinet. He and his small ensemble also played a pair of pieces to bookend the main body of the concert; they spent many hours practicing after school last fall to get their songs down.

The album contains several videos along with the usual selection of photos. William’s concert in particular had a very specific resonance: the last time we were on Booksin’s campus for a concert was March 6, 2020, just a week before our county shut down for the pandemic. I remember wondering at the time if it was a good idea for us all to be there; the kindergarten performances were first thing in the morning, and by afternoon, the concerts for the remaining classes had already been canceled. I flew to Los Angeles later that day for a quick work trip, and my return flight that evening was my last air travel until December 2021.

Speaking of Covid, remember how I said that I’d have more about our travel plans a few paragraphs ago? Well, funny story: after avoiding Covid for nearly three years through equal parts luck and vigilance, our family finally caught it over the holidays. The plan had been for the kids and me to travel to Texas to visit my parents on the day after Christmas—because it was her mother’s first holiday here, Julie was going to stay home with her—but obviously that didn’t happen.

Here’s how things played out. Julie’s brother Bill arrived a few days before Christmas, having driven cross-country from Nebraska. When he arrived, he warned us that his throat had started feeling scratch that morning. Wanting to be cautious, we had him take a antibody test, which came up negative. At that point, we let our guard down a bit, and didn’t take any special precautions. Big mistake. Over the next few days, his symptoms worsened, and Julie, Julia, Joseph, and I all started to feel like we had colds coming on. By Christmas Day, we were definitely sick. That evening, feeling lousy, we tested again, and Grandma Flack, Bill, Julie, Joe, and I were all positive. Julia didn’t bother testing, since her diagnosis seemed like a foregone conclusion.

Our trip to Texas was obviously not going to happen. But, in a strange twist of fate, it might not have happened anyway: our tickets were booked on Southwest Airlines, which, owing to a confluence of bad luck and antiquated systems, suffered a complete meltdown the week of Christmas. Our flights ended up being canceled, and it’s not clear when or even if they could have gotten us to Austin.

Now that we knew we were positive, there wasn’t much for us to do other than hunker down and wait the virus out. Because William was still testing negative, we tried to isolate him as much as we could for the first day. It wasn’t going to last—more than anyone else in the family, he hates to be alone—and he ended up testing positive within twenty-four hours anyway, so we all got to be sick together.

Julie and I went on a hunt for Paxlovid prescriptions for the family, which turned out to be harder than we thought it would be. The criteria for prescribing it seemed to vary quite a bit from doctor to doctor, but eventually we managed to get prescriptions for everyone. It certainly seemed to have worked for me, at least initially: my symptoms were never anywhere close to severe, and I tested negative in about a week, on January 3. On the other hand, a couple days later, I rebounded and started testing positive again. I didn’t feel appreciably sicker, but it took me until January 13 to test negative consistently; by the end, I was really itching to get out of the house.

Viral drama aside, there are a few non-holiday photos in the gallery. There are some shots of Grandma Flack’s new apartment, taken after we hung her pictures; with everything set up, it feels very much like her place. And there are a pair of candid selfies of Julie and Joe at the DMV as Joe took and passed his driver’s test.

This actually wasn’t the first time the two of them visited the DMV intending to take the test: a couple weeks earlier, they made the trip only to learn that, due to some understandable confusion regarding the wording on the web site, they had scheduled the wrong kind of appointment. As a result, they had to make another appointment for a later date. Unfortunately, the next available appointment was more than 18 months after Joe’s original permit had been issued—and, more importantly, after it expired. They had to make a special trip to renew his permit first before returning a second time for the test.

In the end, everything worked out: he passed the test on his first try, and he is now a legally licensed driver in the state of California. That’s not to say he enjoys driving: I think the idea of it was much more alluring than the reality. But he can take himself to music lessons and to after-school activities, which is helpful on busy school nights. And should the occasion arise, he’ll be able to drive to meet up with friends, which I think he’ll find liberating.

Gallery: Christmas 2022