It's Thanksgiving

 Happy Thanksgiving to those of you who celebrate. Happy Thursday to those of you who don't.

And always remember: Woodstock was a cannibal! An adorable little cannibal!

And it's somehow November already?

 Yes, it's November. The middle of November. Thanksgiving (in the US) is next Thursday. T-1 Week an counting.

I've talked about holidays here before, I know. My family doesn't do the big 'everyone over to so-and-so's' get-togethers anymore. Sometimes I go to my aunt's for Thanksgiving. Sometimes I have it with my parents. This is a parents year. They're coming up and staying in a hotel. I'm not thrilled about the hotel part, considering current circumstances, but they didn't like the idea of staying with me, so...parents gonna parent, amirite? To be fair, my place is infinitesimal, but *I* offered to be the one sleeping on the air mattress! Oh well. I tried.

 PU1 and PU2 (that's Parental Unit #1 and Parental Unit #2, for those of you who don't call your parents weird things,) will arrive Wednesday evening and depart Saturday morning. They'll be with me during the daylight hours on Thursday and Friday. We'll eat. We'll chat. We'll sit in silence, staring at each other. Hooray?

 No, Thanksgiving won't be much different than normal.

 Christmas, though? Hoo, boy, is the wind blowing in a strange direction on that one. Well, not really the proper holiday--the Christmas Eve & Day holidays, those will be a half day of work and a three-day weekend of blissful solitude--but the One Christmas Thing I Love So Dearly has a completely different look this year.

We're doing the carol-singing party on Zoom.

 No, for real. We can't get together to sing, so we're doing it online. But it's not going to be a bunch of people trying to sing together over the internet. There's pre-recording involved. Before settling in to write this, I spent an hour and a half recording myself singing carols. I got through seven tonight. I did five last night. I'm only halfway through the list, and that's not counting the ones I may go back to to record a second part in a different vocal range.

 "So how exactly is this going to work?"

It's quite simple, really. My mom and the party hostess (they're BFFs from college,) have already recorded the two piano parts, and the party host has spliced those recordings magically together to form an accompaniment for the rest of us. A select handful of people have been invited to record themselves singing the carols, which the host will then compile into a marvelous digital choir.

MacGyver, eat your heart out.

 I mean, they could have chosen just not to have the party, but it means so much to so many people that they figured out a way to do it in spite of everything else that's going on. We'll still sing, it will just be on mute along with the digitally reconstructed choir. We won't get to pick out the carols as we go along, but the set list has a number of beautiful, lesser-known carols along with plenty of favorites, so that's all right. We've been instructed to have our favorite party food to hand so that we can "share" it with the group, show-and-tell style.

Yes, it's going to be different, all right.

But it's still going to happen.

Thank Your Veterans

 I'm writing this on Wednesday, 11/11/2020. Veteran's Day.

Both of my grandfathers served in WWII.

My maternal grandfather served in Korea.

My uncle served in Vietnam.

One of my best friends was nine years a Marine, and she did tours in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I am grateful for them all.

Thank your veterans. And that's an order.

::takes deep breaths::

Nothing I say will bring any sort of relief to any of us at the moment.

So I shan't say anything.