Christmas was a weird one this year. It started out with one of the kids getting sick the weekend before and then one by one, each of us succumbed to a very nasty and long-lasting flu. Rick got it a couple days before Christmas, I got it Christmas Day and everyone we “celebrated” with that day got mowed down as well.

Sickness is no respecter of persons or calendars.

As much as you can dose yourself with Vitamin C and Oil of Oregano or feed a cold or starve a fever or whatever conventional wisdom would suggest you do, at some point with illness, you just have to buckle in for the ride.

And wait.

There are, of course, tried and true methods of trying to make the waiting more bearable. There’s moaning. There’s napping. There’s trying to decide if you want to eat in spite of your taste buds having gone AWOL. There’s Netflix and now, Disney Plus.

But mostly it’s waiting.

Christmas itself can kind of be a holding pattern. At the end of the year, along comes this day at which point, unless you shop for Christmas gifts at 7-Eleven, you can no longer do anything to prepare. All the flurry of the previous month’s shopping and baking and pre-Christmas revelry comes to a grinding halt and we enter into The Day.

Oh sure, I know it’s not like this for everyone. There’s Christmas travellers and there’s holiday workers like nurses and snow-removal crews that, God bless them, have places to go and things to do. But I’ve always noticed that in general, at Christmas we move into a suspension that if we hold our breath, we can find at least one moment to keep still and enter into the giant snow globe of our memories.

And then after Christmas, the world bounces back into normalcy and it’s over again for another year. The New Year looms, spring-loaded with all it’s potential of days and months “with no mistakes in it yet” as Anne Shirley used to say. We start to make resolutions and workout goals and everyone on the internet wants to sell you their planner that comes complete with unicorns and fairies.

This year sickness has made me press pause a little longer. The snow-globe moments were tinged with the green of sickness this year, but they still happened: all the kids around the table, laughing and playing games when the worst of it let up, going to see the new Star Wars movie. Waiting is hard, but waiting always gives its gifts.

I hope you all had at least one snow globe moment to carry you through to next year.