Holiday Chaos

So the holiday plans got mightily derailed.

 

We planned to send Christmas and New Year's in Poland with my parents--I'm the only child and don't see them often enough so they were really looking forward to it. I was going to fly on my own, and my husband was going to join later while coming back from his work tour. See, he is a pilot in corporate aviation, and his usual tour is six days flying and five days break. The break is normally at home, but he can ask for a temporary change to his "base," meaning at the end of his tour he'd be delivered to the new "home station," and then start the next tour from there as well. This works perfect when we want to visit my parents because a) we save on tickets, and b) he gets the maximum use of his days off, without wasting more time on travel.

 

This is how we planned it this time. I was going to fly out on the 20th and he'd join on the 23rd. But as the time for my departure was approaching, we realised that things may not go so smoothly. His company's making changes to the fleet he flies on, and there was a big chance he might not go on tour at all, but be on home stand-by. No tour means no change of base--but the worst part of it was that we wouldn’t know till the very day. Even if he got one day stand-by, he might still be called on day two or even on day six (e.g., if the duty pilot got sick). 

 

So we found ourselves in a situation where my flight was departing before we knew anything for certain, and the change was big he wouldn't be called, in which case we'd have to pay a boatload of money to get him there last minute -- and the same thing could happen again at the end of our planned stay. 

 

It was all a bit too much, so the evening before my planned departure I called everything off. My mum was devastated. They were both so looking forward to it; she'd been preparing for two months and cooking for the last two weeks. It felt positively dreadful. 

 

And of course, I had nothing prepared or planned. So the last few days I've spent figuring out what to do. It will be just the two of us, so not that much fuss, but still. So there was a visit to a local Polish shop to get some traditional foodstuffs, and some dressing of the house for the occasion. 

 

The Polish tradition has the Christmas Eve meal as the most important part of the holidays, so I'm almost ready for tomorrow… No, it's not going to be the full traditional do with twelve dishes, but we will have the extra setting at the table for an unexpected guest. Funny enough, my husband hadn't been big on Christmas when we met (his background is Dutch Calvinist), but he turned around when I introduced him to our version of the holidays. Now he's more of "traditionalist" than I… At least as far as food and wine are concerned!

We're going to set up skype or Viber on the dining table and we'll be doing remote Christmas with my parents. The joys of technology! 

 

(And of course, in the end he was called up for flying, so he could have arrived today in Warsaw. I'm not telling parents.)