In the days before Christmas, COVID-19 diagnoses hit fast and close to home, with some 15 friends and acquaintances testing positive within a few miles and a few days of each other.
A slew of positive tests — reflecting a new surge that showed our state of Ohio topping U.S. charts for cases and hospitalizations — included a close friend’s family member that put his entire family of 20 in isolation on Christmas Eve.
On Christmas Day, a close friend and her husband tested positive. The 17-year-old girl whose dog plays with ours across the street was diagnosed the week before Christmas. The same happened for the 10-year-old girl I photographed a few days before she was diagnosed.
Luckily, as of the week after Christmas, nobody in our family tested positive — not me, nor any of my three children, nor my son’s fiancee.
Still the threat of COVID-19 made it clear what our family had to do, especially given my compromised immune system, and I was reminded of Santa in “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” when a blinding snowstorm forced him to make a disconsolate announcement:
“Christmas is going to be canceled.”
In the story of Rudolph, it was the magic of a shining nose that saved the day.
In the story of our family, it was mutual respect and maturity as we returned to the safety and isolation of a year-and-a-half ago.
Self-containment was hard enough then.
But this was Christmas, an event my younger Colorado son had taken pains to come home for, that my elder son and middle daughter took work off for.
It is a time when our house typically rocks with the energy of three young adults. Here one minute, gone the next, much of their Christmas is typically spent at impromptu pub gatherings and marathon board game events at friends’ houses and at congested local shops doing last-minute shopping because what other kind of Christmas shopping is there? There is always at least one giant party here when a dozen friends gather around the table in the kitchen while I isolate in my bedroom, telling myself that listening to their laughter from the next room over is just as good as being in the middle of it.
This year, I fretted knowing that I, the Christmas Queen who has for 33 years made a perfect Christmas, would have to enforce a different Christmas for my children.
“I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to step up harsh restrictions again,” I said the morning after Benjie’s flight from Colorado landed. “I don’t think you can be going to people’s houses or having them here.”
And yet their response was as magical as Rudolph’s nose.
“We are only as safe as the most vulnerable among us,” Chris read from a CDC article on his phone, while Emily followed with: “We’ll just have to come up with activities,” and they all chimed in with Scrabble games, movies, singing and art.
As it turns out, it was just us for Christmas 2021, just us doing puzzles, just us playing games, just us cooking soups in the kitchen, writing letters to Santa, singing sacred and secular songs, reading stories, watching meaningful movies, carrying the weight and light of the moment of Christmas.
There were no drop-ins with friends, no running out late on Christmas Eve to deliver gifts to significant others. The kids couldn’t even go see their dad, who, at the beginning of December, entered a memory-care facility where his early-onset dementia could be tended, where the status of COVID made it unsafe for us to go.
And yet the enchantment of Christmas was every bit present, in the hysterical laughter as the children kept trying, and failing, to hang the new, heavy garland outside, in the deep and abiding conversations by candlelight around the table, in the poems we wrote and read to each other as we gave gifts. Nobody ever once begged for anything different, only that we remember to wear our masks.
I have over the years learned to find joy in silver linings.
This is after not only so many months of pandemic, but after 12 years of living with chronic leukemia. This is after not only years of living into my now-ex-husband’s dementia that had him quit teaching college at 59, but after watching my children navigate all these many challenges.
Finding the silver lining in this Christmas wasn’t hard.
Reduced to a smaller world, forced into awareness of what is vital, we yet maintained the underpinnings of a joy-filled Christmas. And then some. Absent all the chaos of hither and yon, we had more time for the silent study of ourselves, the world and each other. I found myself during gift-giving on Christmas morning closing my eyes to absorb the moment of giving and gratitude.
I narrowed my gaze and found what was in my sights to be revealing, a new reality: That whether the Christmas Queen is here or not, they got this.
They know how to do it.
Not just Christmas.
But care.
