Celebrating Thanksgiving will be different due to COVID-19. That could be a good thing
No, Thanksgiving 2020 won’t be the same Norman Rockwell-style holiday that so many of us have tried, often unsuccessfully, to recreate.
Smart people — those who are closely observing COVID-19 restrictions and guidelines to ensure a safe holiday — likely will find huge gaps in their customary celebrations. For instance:
- No big, boisterous gathering of family and friends. Instead, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend having a small celebration, preferably outdoors, with a limited number of people from your family-and-neighborhood “bubble.”
- No groaning tables of communal food, shared potluck style. CDC scientists recommend that the guests bring their own food and drink.
- No sharing bites of pumpkin pie and sips of eggnog.
- No gathering around the TV to watch the parade or the game.
- No monster Black Friday mob-scene shop-a-thon.
- No round-robin visits, hopping frenetically from house to house, from city to city or state to state.
The holiday can still be festive, but we all know it’ll be different. Big time.
Celebrating Thanksgiving this year will feel a little like being a caregiver.
It’s not just about being confined at home and having our movements and activities severely restricted. We’re doing what we do because we want so much to care for and protect others.
Wearing a mask when you’re around other people is like all the steps we take to make sure Husband Richard’s environment is as safe and sanitary as we can make it, given that, since August, he’s been confined to a hospital bed in our living room.
Sequestering, quarantining and restricting your activities away from home is like the social constraints of caring for someone who can’t move around much anymore. Getting him onto another piece of furniture is challenging enough these days, let alone getting him into and out of the van to go someplace else.
Limiting the number of people we see to a select few is just common sense in both situations.
Celebrating Thanksgiving during COVID-19
If you’re wisely restricting your Thanksgiving attendees to your family bubble, doing only those things that truly appeal to you and not hosting an over-the-top meal and celebration, a pandemic-style holiday can still be wonderful, with a good time for all.
Here are some of the potential benefits:
- No attic-to-basement house cleaning on a deadline — unless that’s really what you want to do on a cold November day.
- No enduring a l-o-n-g afternoon with people you don’t even know or, worse yet, you really don’t like.
- No having to deal with that disagreeable, decades-long family feud, the twin nephews from hell or the uncle who always tells raunchy stories to the preteens and then falls asleep in his mashed potatoes.
- No kitchen full of wannabe chefs all elbowing to use the same counter at the same time.
- No angst about lumpy gravy, dry turkey, runny cranberry sauce or the smoke coming out of the oven because we forgot the rolls (again). Your bubble folks are forgiving, or at least they’d better be!
- No spontaneous, drop-in visitors, just as you’re stirring frantically to keep those lumps out of the above-mentioned gravy.
- No choking down that awful lime Jello salad, bone-dry turducken, boiled-until-they’re-dead Brussels sprouts or Aunt Edna’s dreaded casserole.
- No feeling like you’ve gained 270 pounds in one sitting, giving you a stomach that’s stretched from here to Tulsa.
- And no being left with a disaster area of a kitchen and a huge pile of dirty dishes, with nobody there to help you clean up.
Remember the real meaning of the holiday
Here’s hoping that, on this unusual Thanksgiving, you’ll remember what the holiday is really about: spending time with those you love and creating wonderful, if different, memories with them.
And please remember to be grateful for what you have, right now.
We certainly are.
Husband Richard has been improving steadily since we brought him home from the hospital in August. My strong, stubborn man has been defying the predictions of all those gloom-and-doom doctors who didn’t know him as he’s been validating the unshakable confidence of those who do.
It’s so amazingly wonderful to see him sit — unsupported! — at the edge of his hospital bed, with his legs over the side, sometimes for as long as 30 minutes. Or to see him standing, albeit for short periods with a walker and people supporting and steadying him on both sides.
For us, the real reason for Thanksgiving is having him here to celebrate it with us, however we do it. Anybody for pasta?
