150 days gone, dreaded holidays soon approaching

150 days down, 123 days to go. Insert raspberry noise here __________.

Before Dale left, I said this to the Prairie Soldier, the Joint Newspaper of the Nebraska Army and Air National Guard:


“It’s going to be hard. It’s not so much the Fourth of July or the summer I’m worried about. It’s more like Christmas and Thanksgiving. Once we are six months in, how I am going to deal with it?”


I think I must be a future reader because we're now nearing month 6 and I'm not sure how I'm going to deal with the upcoming holidays. Eerie.  Ok, not really, who in their right mind wouldn't dread that holidays when you're missing one big, 6'4, part of your family.


I anticipate my emotions are going to run amok. I'm going to cry a lot and be extremely irritable and moody. It's not going to be pretty. Seriously. Who looks pretty when they cry?


Of course, regardless of my feelings, these holidays will come and I'll be forced to face them. There's no other option than to just throw myself into them with as much energy as I can muster. I'll try my best to remember the reasons for these holidays, and attempt to keep my mind positive as I focus on the well-being of the kids. 


We'll take it day by day and keep to as many traditions as we can. We'll all eat too much. We'll decorate the tree. We'll drive around looking at Christmas lights and drink hot chocolate. We'll do whatever we can to make these holidays just as special as they were in the past. 


And at the end of it all, as the kids go to sleep with their heads filled with sugarplums and candies, Santa will curl into a ball to cry until there's nothing left, then wake up anew to face another day.