Day 13 of Blogmas 2025, and we’re past the halfway point of this December marathon. For those just joining, Blogmas is my annual commitment to posting holiday-themed content every single day through Christmas. This year’s posts are prompted by AI, because apparently I needed help coming up with ways to write about Christmas. Today’s prompt asks: What’s the most unusual Christmas you’ve ever experienced (travel, weather, unexpected events, etc.)?

You know, memory is a funny thing. When I try to recall unusual Christmases, my brain has apparently filed most of them under “Standard Christmas Protocol” and smoothed out all the rough edges. The disasters fade, the awkwardness blurs, and what remains is this generic warm glow of “Christmas happened, it was fine.” But there’s one that stands out, not because it was dramatically unusual, but because it was quietly, necessarily different: Christmas 2020.

The pandemic Christmas. The one we all experienced but experienced alone, together but apart, celebrating while the world held its breath.

The Context We’d Rather Forget

By December 2020, we’d been living in the pandemic reality for nine months. Remember that? The initial “two weeks to flatten the curve” had become a running joke so dark we’d stopped laughing. We’d learned new vocabulary—social distancing, contact tracing, pod, bubble. We’d become minor experts in epidemiology, or at least we thought we had. We’d had a Zoom Thanksgiving that nobody talks about anymore because it was too depressing to become a memory worth keeping.

And now Christmas was coming, pandemic or no pandemic, because that’s what Christmas does. It arrives on December 25th regardless of global circumstances, indifferent to our ability to properly celebrate it.

The question wasn’t whether we’d have Christmas. The question was how to have Christmas when gathering with family might literally kill someone.

The Matriarch on the Front Steps

My grandmother—Mamaw—was in her late eighties in 2020. The exact demographic that COVID seemed to target with particular cruelty. The early data from nursing homes had been terrifying. The words “underlying conditions” and “elderly” appeared in every article about COVID deaths, usually in the same sentence.

This was the woman whose house had been Christmas headquarters for my entire life. The rotating tree, the basement gift exchange, the whole production I’ve written about before—that was Mamaw’s domain. The idea of Christmas without her wasn’t just sad; it was geometrically impossible. How do you have Christmas without the person who IS Christmas?

But how do you have Christmas WITH her when a hug could be a death sentence?

The Plan That Wasn’t Really a Plan

We did what families all over the world did that year: we improvised. We made it up as we went along. We created new traditions out of necessity and pretended they were choices.

The family would gather at my uncle’s house—those of us who had been somewhat careful, who could reasonably assume we weren’t carrying the plague. We’d have dinner. We’d exchange gifts. We’d do all the Christmas things, except for the most important Christmas thing: having Mamaw there.

Then someone—I don’t remember who, which seems impossible for such an important idea—suggested we go to her house and sing carols from the yard.

It wasn’t a perfect solution. It wasn’t even a particularly good solution. But it was something, and in December 2020, something was everything.

The Strangest Caroling Service

Picture this: about fifteen people, bundled in winter coats, standing on a lawn in Roanoke, Virginia, singing Christmas carols with varying degrees of competence while an eighty-something woman watched from her front steps, unable to come closer, unable to invite us in, unable to offer us hot chocolate or cookies or any of the things she’d been offering for decades.

We were masked, because of course we were. Have you ever tried to sing “O Holy Night” through a cloth mask? It’s like trying to play a trumpet through a pillow. The harmonies were muffled, the high notes were impossible, and everyone sounded like they were singing from inside a paper bag.

But we sang anyway.

We went through the classics—”Silent Night,” “The First Noel,” “Away in a Manger.” The songs our families had sung together in that very house for generations, now being performed like some sort of reverse concert where the audience of one couldn’t approach the stage.

Mamaw stood on her front step, probably cold but not admitting it, smiling in that way that could have meant happiness or could have meant she was humoring us. It was impossible to tell from twenty feet away. The distance that had never existed before—that carefully maintained space between her and us—felt like a canyon.

My cousin’s kids, too young to really understand why they couldn’t run up and hug their great-grandmother, kept starting toward the steps before being gently pulled back by their parents. “Remember, we have to stay on the grass. We’re keeping Mamaw safe.”

Keeping her safe by staying away. Showing love by maintaining distance. Everything backwards, everything wrong, everything necessary.

The Gifts We Couldn’t Give

Someone had dropped off presents at her house earlier—left them on the porch, rung the doorbell, and retreated like we were playing some sort of reverse home invasion. The gift exchange, usually a chaotic affair of paper and ribbons and thank-you hugs, had become a contactless delivery service.

I remember thinking about all the Christmas movies where the gift isn’t the important thing, where the real present is togetherness, family, love, all that Hallmark nonsense. Turns out they were right, but not in the way they meant. The absence of togetherness that year made every previous Christmas where we’d taken physical proximity for granted seem impossibly luxurious.

The Weird Gratitude

Here’s the strange thing about that pandemic Christmas: it was terrible and beautiful at the same time. Terrible because of what we couldn’t do, beautiful because of what we chose to do anyway.

Standing on that lawn, singing badly through masks, watching my grandmother from an impossible distance, I was simultaneously heartbroken and grateful. Heartbroken that this was what Christmas had become. Grateful that we were all still here to have any Christmas at all.

How many families were missing someone that December? How many empty chairs, how many presents that would never be opened, how many traditions that ended not by choice but by virus? We were the lucky ones, standing on a lawn, singing to a woman who was still there to hear us.

The gratitude was complicated though. It came with guilt—why were we okay when so many weren’t? It came with fear—would we still be okay next Christmas? It came with anger—why did it have to be this way? But mostly, it came with a hyperawareness of the present moment, of this specific Christmas, these specific people, this specific grandmother on her specific step, still here, still watching, still Christmas even if everything else had changed.

The Things We Learned

That Christmas taught us things we didn’t want to know. That traditions aren’t as permanent as we think. That proximity isn’t guaranteed. That sometimes love looks like distance. That Christmas can survive almost anything, but the cost of that survival changes its shape.

We learned to be grateful for things we’d never thought to be grateful for before. The ability to hug. The option to share a meal. The privilege of breathing the same air without fear. Basic human interactions had become luxuries, and we felt rich and poor at the same time.

We also learned that we could adapt. That faced with impossible circumstances, we could create new ways to maintain connection. That caroling from a yard wasn’t ideal, but it was something. That something was better than nothing. That nothing was what too many families had that year.

The Return to Normal That Wasn’t

By Christmas 2021, we were “back to normal,” which is to say we were back to gathering in the same room, sharing meals, exchanging hugs. The vaccines had come, the urgency had faded, the masks had mostly come off (depending on your politics and paranoia level).

But it wasn’t really normal. How could it be? We’d seen how quickly it could all fall apart. We’d learned that “see you next Christmas” was a hope, not a promise. We’d discovered that traditions we thought were carved in stone were actually written in sand, one wave away from disappearing.

Mamaw was there in 2021, in the house, at the table, within hugging distance. We probably hugged her extra that year, held on a little longer, noticed things we’d stopped noticing before. The way she laughed at the kids’ excitement. The way she pretended the gifts we gave her were exactly what she wanted. The way she was there, present, touchable, mortal.

She passed in 2023. Not from COVID—she survived the pandemic that targeted her demographic with such precision. Time got her instead, the way it gets everyone eventually. But she had those last two Christmases after the pandemic, the ones where we could touch her, where we could gather, where we could do Christmas properly even while knowing that “properly” was a fragile concept.

The Permanent Change

That pandemic Christmas changed something fundamental about how I experience the holidays. Not in a dramatic way—I don’t walk around overwhelmed with gratitude every December. But there’s an awareness now that wasn’t there before. An understanding that every Christmas where everyone gathers is a small miracle. That every tradition we’re able to maintain is a gift. That every hug, every shared meal, every moment of proximity is a choice we’re allowed to make until suddenly we’re not.

When people talk about unusual Christmases, they usually mean the dramatic ones—the blizzards, the power outages, the family fights that become legend. But 2020 was unusual in its quietness, in what didn’t happen rather than what did. We didn’t gather. We didn’t hug. We didn’t share meals. We didn’t do any of the things that make Christmas Christmas, except we did them anyway, just differently, carefully, at a distance.

Standing on that lawn, singing through masks to a grandmother we couldn’t touch, we were doing something profoundly human: maintaining connection despite obstacles, creating joy despite circumstances, being family despite distance. It wasn’t the Christmas we wanted, but it was the Christmas we had, and having it at all felt like a revolution.

The Truth About Unusual

The most unusual thing about that Christmas wasn’t the pandemic, the masks, or the social distancing. It was the clarity it provided about what actually matters. Strip away the dinners, the gift exchanges, the physical proximity, and what’s left? People standing on a lawn, singing beautifully, refusing to let circumstances completely dictate their choices.

That’s what Christmas actually is, it turns out. Not the traditions themselves, but the insistence on maintaining them. Not the gatherings, but the determination to gather. Not the perfect celebration, but the imperfect attempt to celebrate anyway.

That pandemic Christmas was unusual in all the obvious ways. But it was also unusually honest about what we’re actually doing every December: standing in the cold, singing old songs, trying to create meaning and connection in a world that seems determined to prevent both.

We’re all still standing on that lawn, really. Still singing through whatever masks we’re wearing. Still trying to bridge the distances between us. Still hoping everyone will be here next year. Still grateful when they are.

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What was your most unusual Christmas? Did the pandemic change your traditions too, or was there another year when everything went sideways? How did you adapt, and what did you learn about what really matters during the holidays? Share your stories of Christmases that didn’t go according to plan in the comments below.