J and I weren’t planning to put up a Christmas tree this year. The mini one we’d been using lost its legs last year and I didn’t fancy taping it to a table again this year.
I’m off on annual leave this week, however, and we’ve been deciding on what (if anything) we want to do for Christmas this year seeing as it’s just us two again (we aim to have every second year to ourselves in general, instead of spending it with family). As a couple who don’t generally celebrate this time of the year for various reasons, it’s been fun to come up with our own “traditions” and way of doing things.
Like deciding to watch all the 4K Extended Editions of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings in the run up to Christmas, ending with The Return of the King on Christmas Eve.
We’ve also agreed to split our Christmas dinner cooking over two nights. Cooking our Ham and the Festive Nut Roast (a recipe by the fantastic Jack Monroe; I made this for the first time last year and it was delish!) on Christmas Eve instead of Christmas Day.
This way we get to have the ‘Festive Sandwiches’ I invented last year as a way to use up the left overs, in advance, and also means I’m not having to cook all of the food on the 25th. Now I can just chuck the veg, potatoes and Yorkies in the oven and heat up the rest and we’re laughing.
We actually also bought each other Halloween presents this year instead, with a few extra items given and received between October-December. No specific dates or times, just an agreement that neither of us wanted to waste trees (wrapping paper and cards), and as we weren’t going to have a tree or celebrate a traditional Christmas, there was no reason to hang onto the presents.
It helps that we also gifted one another a PS4 game each, which we of course got to play on their respective release days.
We also decided to splurge on a joint present and got ourselves a couple of the Pandemic Legacy Board Games.
(If you don’t already know, Legacy Board Games are designed as a continuing campaign, with the Pandemic ones lasting anywhere from 12-24 games, but after which there is not much in the way of replay-ability.)
We got Pandemic Legacy Season 1 (which, technically, we’ve played before but we loved it so much we wanted to play it again). And, to help support our local Board Game Café, who’ve sadly had to close again as our area went into Teir 4, we also picked up Pandemic Legacy Season 0 from them.
When we got home, J made a comment about how many of the games we now owned and I joked that we probably had enough to make a Christmas tree out of them…
Can you see where this is going?
I know, I know. It may seem in poor taste to some, but they’re honestly my favourite series of board games and no Covid-pandemic is going to stop me from saving the world!
What do you think?
And if you celebrate the holiday season, I’d love to hear what non-traditional things you’ve been doing this year.
Drop me a comment on this post, or via one of my social media channels, if you’d like to chat.
[ photo originally posted to my FaceBook page ]
I hope that you, wherever you are in the world, are able to stay safe this year.
