Contagion: Christmas Eve

 

We will not have a white Christmas.  We will, however, have a cold one. 

Today, Christmas Eve, the temperatures will not crack 20 degrees.  It is cold and it is windy.  Christmas day will have the temperature will creep into the 20s.  Consistent with the warmer globe, we will be in the 40s by Sunday.

Cold and no snow aside, it will be a very different Christmas.  Whatever we do will involve less people… much less.  We normally host Christmas Eve and have 20 to 30 family and friends over.  We set up tables in the living room and another in my office.  Every room of the house is decorated as you would expect to see on the pages of a glossy magazine.  It is a real effort of which my role is minimal as many of you might suspect.  It takes several to prepare the décor which add as much to the festivities as the house full of people brimming with Christmas cheer. 

Tonight, instead of 25 or 30 people, we will be down to a handful.  For the second year in a row, we will not have our children of grandchildren with us.  We will be just 3 people:  my wife, her mother, and me.

This is the number we had at Thanksgiving.  It was nice.  It worked.  It was acceptable.  It was OK.  We were thankful to be together and break bread.

Somehow Christmas is different.  Christmas involves weeks of preparation and twelve days of festivities.  Christmas is a house full of people with tables full of family from Christmas Eve to New Years day. 

It will be lesser this year.

We have less decorations.  We will have less people and food.  We will open gifts with a much smaller gathering. 

But, we will celebrate this holiday… this holy day.

We will have the meals.  We will exchange and open the gifts.  We will enjoy the ambience of the decorations we did put up from the glow of candles in our windows to the warmth of the hearth and illuminated tree.

Most everyone else will have less this year as well.

We will have less people, less noise, less banter, less chaos.  We will still have the warmth of each other.  We will have the noise, banter, and chaos in the style of FaceTime and Zoom.  While we appreciate and are thankful for this technology, these calls are shorter and are a substitute, a much better substitute than mere phone calls, for the real thing.  We will work with the hand we have been dealt.  We will appreciate every moment of every call.

There are others that truly have less.

We all know people who have lost loved ones to this virus.  We know or know of people whose businesses and livelihoods have been negatively impacted by the life-style change thrust upon us by this pandemic.  If we are a little subdued, I can only imagine what these folks might be feeling.  I hope that the spirit of the season will bring them some comfort.

It is not Thanksgiving, but we are thankful as if it were.  We pray for those in emotional pain or economic duress.  We pray that next year, we may be able to gather as we like, as we were used to, and that, speaking for myself, may have taken a little for granted.

We will count our blessings.

We will pray for peace on earth and health, safety, and goodwill for all people.