12 days of Christmas, yes we did. My tree is still up as are all the other decorations. I am considering leaving everything in place because my friend from Beijing is coming for a visit on January 23, and bringing her son and his wife with her. Son and wife have never been in America for Christmas, so what do you think? Leave it up or take it down? There’s so much I have had to decide in the past two months, I don’t know why a decision about Christmas decorations is even on the radar. Maybe I just don’t want to do the work.

One of my friends who is a psychologist (and her husband died 6 years ago) told me a metaphor:
Losing a spouse is like going to a foreign country, where you don’t know the language, you don’t understand the culture and you can never go home. That pretty much nails how all this feels.