COVID Christmas

This past Christmas was one for the history books. For most people, 2020 marked the first year in decades, or possibly ever, that they did not spend it with all their loved ones. The novel coronavirus that swept into our lives early this year has had such a chokehold on our existence at this point that it seems life may never get back to normal. And yet we endured; at least most of us did.

I was exceptionally lucky. All four of my children were able to come into town well before Thanksgiving and stay until after we had opened presents and feasted on my daughter’s delicious cinnamon rolls on Christmas Day. It’s true that we missed the hoopla of my husband’s large family Christmas extravaganza, yet there was something very relaxing and peaceful about staying home and just being together. One by one, my kids have resumed their “normal” lives, not too choked up about leaving us after so much family time.

But everyone was not so lucky. Some of my siblings were unable to see their children and grandchildren in person. On Facebook, I noticed postings of lots of Zoom Christmas gatherings in lieu of face-to-face celebrations. And, of course, hundreds of thousands of people faced their first Christmas without a loved one lost to this terrible virus. The continuing death toll was a sobering shadow hanging over this COVID Christmas.

Our experience this year, however, is nothing new to the many people who routinely spend Christmas without loved ones. We have military families across the country who every year miss fathers, mothers, and siblings posted far overseas in dangerous and uncomfortable conditions. Health care workers and first responders, not to mention our newly appreciated essential workers, are often pressed into service on the holiday. And many people were already struggling with loneliness before COVID-19 made isolation something we all experienced. I hope that our experience this Christmas will give us a sense of empathy and solidarity with those who see Christmas as something to endure, not celebrate.

This Christmas, one of my husband’s sisters decided that since we weren’t having our annual family gift exchange, her family would use the money they would have spent gifts to help some families in need. I thought this was a beautiful gesture and a great way to make lemonade out of lemons, as they say. Perhaps our COVID Christmas will help us establish new rituals, new priorities, and a new outlook on our lives going forward into 2021.

Happy Birthday, Dad

Today is my late father’s birthday. Falling on Christmas Eve, his birthday always lent an extra sparkle to the holiday. A quiet and unassuming man, my dad would absorb the hubbub of festivities with good humor. He had an easy manner but hadn’t had an easy life.

My father was born during the flu pandemic of 1918. This fact never had much impact on me until this year. I cannot imagine how my grandmother was able to cope with pregnancy and childbirth so close to a holiday – and with the specter of death so close at hand. World War I was still raging, and privation was routine.

One of 12 children, my father had to make his own way in the world after serving in World War II. He married my mother but lost her to complications of childbirth less than a year after their eight-year-old daughter had died. Throughout his life, my dad was never really able to share his grief about these twin losses, even to his second wife. Yet he staunchly carried on, raising a family that had grown from five children to ten with his marriage to my new mom.

My dad had a near mythical patience at times. He lovingly tended both a flower and a vegetable garden. Tall and slim, he neither ate nor drank to excess. He seldom ate sweets, and on those rare occasions that he did, we kids marveled at how long he could make a candy bar last.

Of course, my father was not perfect. He could get very angry and raise his voice at us. He liked to argue and did not suffer fools gladly. Having had a hard life, he had no use for self-pity and did not tolerate it from us. Sometimes this felt cold and uncaring to me. But more often, I felt his gentle presence in my life as a soft place to land.

In his forties, my father developed a rare and, thankfully, non contagious form of tuberculosis. He spent months in a sanitarium but never completely recovered, and breathing problems plagued him for the rest of his life. He died just a few months shy of his 81st birthday.

Over the years, I have found ways to celebrate Christmas Eve with my own family of six. But I will always miss those special birthday celebrations with my dad on the eve of Christ’s birth. Happy Birthday, Dad! And thank you for all your love and care.

Christmas Viewing for 2020

The holiday season ushers in a lot of heartwarming Christmas fare on television: Christmas episodes of our favorite shows, movies such as Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life, and, of course, perennial favorites such as A Charlie Brown Christmas and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The Hallmark channel boasts such confections as Christmas Waltz and Christmas Comes Twice. All these “happy ever afters,” though, seem inconsistent with the year we have just had. 2020 has literally knocked us down in many cases, and the treacly sentiments of Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas” as snow gently falls seem out of touch with our zeitgeist. In that spirit, I have some alternative recommendations for your Christmas viewing:

1. A Christmas Story – Although the trials and tribulations of myopic Ralphie Parker have become a perennial favorite at Christmastime, I still think the movie’s somewhat jaundiced view of the holiday and of family life is a refreshing counterpoint to the image of the perfect family clad in matching pajamas and singing around the fire. Just turn on your leg lamp and enjoy. I guarantee you won’t “put your eye out.”
2. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation – I have to admit I’ve never seen this gem, only bits and pieces of it since it is shown every five minutes somewhere in TV Land. Yet I have to believe any movie that stars Chevy Chase as the patriarch has to be filled with laughs and hijinks – and plenty of dysfunction.
3. Christmas With the Kranks – This film is based on a much better and funnier book by John Grisham titled Skipping Christmas. Still, it is a fairly amusing take on the relentless hustle and bustle and decorating one-upmanship of the season. Any movie with Jamie Lee Curtis and Tim Allen is a winner in my book.
4. There are your raunchy selections, such as Bad Santa and Bad Moms Christmas. Or if you are into the horror genre, you might enjoy the zombie movie Anna and the Apocalypse or the slasher flick Black Christmas. And of course, die hard fans insist that Die Hard is a Christmas movie.
5. My absolute number one choice, however, is not a movie or a special but a Netflix series from Norway called Home for Christmas. Sure, the title makes it sound like another saccharine holiday selection. Instead, it is a delightfully off-center depiction of a 30-something single woman getting all kinds of flak for not having a significant other by her family members. Determined to have a boyfriend by Christmas Eve so as not to be stuck at the kid’s table, Johanne embarks on a series of not-so-great dates and other encounters facilitated by swiping right. Rife with bad language, binge drinking, sex, and nudity, Home for Christmas is most definitely not a family movie night selection. Yet it’s not a farce either. The characters in the show are flawed yet lovable, and their relationships and, especially, Johanne’s work as a nurse are fully realized and interesting. There are two short seasons of Home for Christmas with episodes running only 29 minutes each. It is infinitely bingeable. And I recommend watching it in the original Norweigian with subtitles. The English-dubbed version is just bizarre in the way of old Japanese movies from the Sixties.

So there you have it: holiday viewing options for a very peculiar year. May your days be merry and bright – and your evenings filled with alternative Christmas delight.

Permission to Slow Down

While driving the other day, I got stuck behind a slow-moving vehicle. You know the ones: tractors or other heavy machinery with a bright orange triangle on the back warning motorists, “I’m not going to be picking up speed anytime soon.” Far from being an annoyance, though, being in the path of the slow-moving vehicle gave me the opportunity to cruise along and admire the houses and front yards I passed by, to savor the sight of the winter sun peeking from within the clouds, and to admire the v-formations of geese in the sky.

Although I had a destination, I was in no hurry. Not so the ambulance with siren and flashing lights dodging traffic left and right as it passed us. Or some of the cars in front of me that, impatient with the snail’s pace, passed the slow-moving tractor as it meandered past fields and shops, indifferent to the hustle and bustle around it. Tractor driver and I had time, and I could feel the slowing of my heart rate as I took this opportunity to relax and observe my surroundings.

There is so much benefit to slowing down in our lives. I know that’s not always possible. People have jobs to get to, schools bells to beat, appointments to make. We get so used to hurrying, though, that we continue to speed through life even when we don’t need to. I remember during the early days of the coronavirus shutdown being flabbergasted by cars zooming by, in a hurry to get nowhere.

Our modern society is primed for speed. Technology has made just about everything faster. High speed internet is the Holy Grail of computer usage. Many of us who still vividly remember the screech of a dial up connection and the seconds ticking by as we waited in front of a blank screen now demand internet at the speed of light. When my email is slow to load or the server doesn’t send my message within seconds, I find myself getting miffed. We carry tiny computers in our pockets and literally ask the world of them. Yet not so long ago, we had no ability to contact anyone when we left our homes until we arrived at our destination or found a payphone along the way. Nowadays, if I leave the house without my cell phone, my children think I’m dead.

The slow-moving vehicle eventually turned onto a side road, and my excuse to dawdle drifted away like the exhaust trailing from its tail. I completed my errands and made my way home. As I did, I noticed five snowy white swans swimming in a perfect straight line along the edge of a pond. Their stately bearing and unhurried pace reminded me that it’s not important how fast I travel, only that I get to the other side.

Let’s Own This Moment, Americans

On a dreary Sunday morning, truck after truck rolled slowly out of an unprepossessing manufacturing facility in the small, nondescript town of Portage, Michigan. Their mission was nothing short of saving American lives.

The first COVID-19 vaccines left the Pfizer Pharmaceutical facility to little fanfare but a surprising outpouring of emotion on the part of ordinary Americans. Across the country, people reported bursting into tears when they saw news video of the trucks heading out to the airport in Grand Rapids, where they would be dispersed across the country and given first to workers on the front lines of the coronavirus epidemic. (Washington Post, Dec. 15, 2020)

This year has tested the mettle of all Americans to one degree or another. Health care workers and first responders continue to suffer from physical and emotional fatigue as they battle an indefatigable adversary. Essential workers have risked – and in many cases lost – their lives in order to keep the basic machinery of our society running. All of us have given up so much in order to contain the spread of the virulent strain of coronavirus that has killed more than 300,000 Americans. Compared to huge historical disasters, including 9/11, and even compared to the seasonal flu, that number is horrifying.

I find myself equal parts heartened by the intellectual prowess of American scientists and doggedness of American workers and saddened by the social and political divisiveness that have marked the nation’s response to this common enemy. In Michigan, the same state that provided the genesis of the first approved COVID-19 vaccines, protesters threatened the life of the governor when she had the audacity to ask for reasonable sacrifices in order to control the spread of the virus. Anti-maskers across the country often hail from the very rural and industrial regions that have become essential lifelines to a country in quarantine.

Whenever I drive through the less populated areas of the Midwest, I am impressed by the engines of sustenance I see around me. The farms that crisscross the region, the energy plants, the manufacturing centers that used to dominate cities can now be found seemingly in the middle of nowhere. I can understand why people in Middle America often feel neglected and forgotten. Theirs are the less glamorous but nevertheless essential jobs upon which the large cities of America depend.

I truly wish we could have a meeting of minds between so-called city elites and ordinary, rural Americans. I wish there were no blue states, nor red states, but only purple crazy quilts of the variety that makes America so unique. We all have our world views, our religious (or nonreligious) beliefs, our political priorities. But we share a common dream: to make America a thriving democracy that works for all its citizens.

As the first vaccines bring the promise of an end to the pandemic, let us be united at least in this: to vanquish this shared threat to our lives and livelihoods so that we can attend to the business of getting our country back on track and thriving once more.

Feels Like Christmas

Last night I noticed a dull ache in my back and realized that I had spent a lot of time bent over wrapping Christmas presents. In a funny way, I welcomed the pain. It felt like Christmas.

Christmas has always been my favorite holiday. There is so much to love: the lights, the decorations, the gifts around the tree. Christmas cookies! Caroling! Mostly I just love the spirit of joy that is part of the season. But that does not mean Christmas isn’t a lot of work – especially for moms.

Even before Thanksgiving, I start thinking about what to get my loved ones for Christmas. I peruse catalogs and make preliminary forays into stores to get ideas. At my annual shopping trip with my sisters in the fall, I am on the lookout for the perfect ornament for each of my children to add to their collection. Of course, this year I have let my fingers do the walking, as the Yellow Pages ad used to say, and done almost all my shopping online. I have read that in this year of COVID, there have been unprecedented numbers of items being shipped around the country. While it’s not the same as visiting the mall and admiring the giant tree near Santa’s workshop – and having lunch with a sister or two (or three!) – once the gifts arrive and I am wrapping them in colorful paper, I can get into the Christmas spirit.

I’ve mentioned in an earlier post that I’ve noticed people getting into the spirit of decorating early this year. The neighbors with the giant Halloween inflatables have switched to Frosty, but their lawns are equally crowded with Christmas-themed decorations. Although we have yet to have snow, when I go out near dark, I get the same twinkle in my eye that I do every Christmas looking at all the lights.

Then there is the Christmas music. I’ve rediscovered a holiday treasure trove, and every day I select one, put it in the CD player (Remember those?), and listen to both sacred and popular songs of the season. I have choral masterworks, pop collections, piano versions, and even a jazz treatment of holiday songs called Smooth Yule. Filling the house with Christmas music while making gingerbread will really get a mom into the mood.

This Christmas will be very different for most of us. We won’t see extended family, won’t travel, won’t host or attend holiday parties. Many of us are dealing with family members who have succumbed to COVID-19. Too many others are mourning the loss of a loved one to the virus. Those who have been alone and struggling may find little to be joyful about this Christmas.

One of my favorite Christmas songs is “Breath of Heaven,” an imagined meditation by Mary as she makes the arduous trip to Bethlehem to give birth to the Savior. Her pleas can be ours this Christmas:

Breath of Heaven, hold me together
Be forever near me, breath of Heaven
Breath of Heaven, light in my darkness
Pour over me your holiness, for You are holy
Breath of Heaven

I pray that whatever your circumstances, you can imbibe some of the spirit of this beautiful season that is meant to bring joy to the world for one and all.

Bubblegum Babe

It all started when I was a “5-year-old teenager” wearing white vinyl go-go boots and dancing the twist and the pony in the family basement while listening to the Beatles sing, “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.” I was a teeny bopper in training. Somehow, an embarrassing number of decades later, I still haven’t lost my love for what we used to call bubblegum music.

Growing up, I was a huge fan of popular dance music variety TV shows such as Shindig and Hullabaloo, along with the venerable Dick Clark show American Bandstand. These shows featured the latest hits and hip teens dancing along to them. I actually begged my mom to let me go on the children’s version of these shows, Kiddie-a-Go-Go! Ah, dreams of dressing in miniskirts and dancing in cages. Such a budding feminist!

As a preteen, I entered teeny bopper heaven with the advent of Motown’s Jackson Five and musical dreamboat Michael Jackson’s dorky white counterpart, Donny Osmond. If I wasn’t learning the “ABC”s from Michael, Marlon, Jackie and Tito, I was being told “Go away, little girl” by toothy young Donny. There were so many fun pop groups in this era: Herman’s Hermits, the Monkees, even comic Jerry Lewis’s son Gary and his Playboys. Their cute visages populated my favorite fan magazines, and their music made me smile – and dance. (I outgrew the boots but kept the cool moves.)

Even made-up bands from TV shows such as The Archies and The Partridge Family had big, catchy hits that I loved. I mean, how can you beat lyrics like, “Honey, oh, Sugar, Sugar, you are my candy girl, and you’ve got me wanting you”? And when David Cassidy sang, “I think I love you,” well, a girl could dream, couldn’t she?

I’m still partial to light-hearted, bouncy pop music. In the early 2000s, we had the Backstreet Boys and ‘NSync. The Jonas Brothers and One Direction kept the boy band craze alive well into a new millennium. And let’s not forget the YouTube phenomenon Justin Bieber! Legions of “Beliebers” brought fame and fortune to this unknown preteen from Canada. And lest you think I’m sexist, I can also get down to the music of female pop stars like Debbie Gibson, Miley Cyrus (especially in her Hannah Montana days), and Taylor Swift.

What is it about this light-hearted pop that hooks me? Well, as they used to say on American Bandstand, “It’s got a good beat. I can dance to it.” Whether that means tapping the steering wheel in my car or shaking my booty while stirring the pasta in my kitchen, bubblegum pop will always inspire me to move.

The other day while I was driving, the One Direction song “Best Song Ever” came on. The song is a breezy tune about an unforgettable night with the girl of his dreams while dancing to a very forgettable popular song: “And we danced all night to the best song ever/ We knew every line; now I can’t remember.”

That is the crux of bubblegum music. It’s as frothy and refreshing as an ice cream soda on a hot summer day. It goes down easily and is soon forgotten. But it makes this old teeny bopper smile.

Sh*#’s Getting Real

For many of us, it can be hard to accept the reality of the current pandemic. We go about our day-to-day lives unmolested by the virus, so it doesn’t seem real. It becomes easy to increase our risk-taking as we long to resume our normal lives – until the Coronavirus hits too close to home.

Prior to a few weeks ago, I had known of no close relatives succumbing to COVID-19. Since then, an avalanche of infections in my family members and my in-laws has made the latest surge in infections all too real. Several of my husband’s siblings and their children have been infected, and my sister-in-law is currently being hospitalized with the disease. Then just the other day, I received news that my 89-year-old mother had tested positive. She had been sick for a few days and had enlisted the help of my brother and sister. Now not only is my mom in nursing care, but my brother has succumbed to the illness. I’m sure my sister is now waiting for the other shoe to drop.

My mother’s experience has also highlighted for me what I’d been reading in the news but had not seen firsthand. Hospitals are being inundated with COVID patients, and health care services are severely strained. My mom had to wait at least an hour in an ambulance outside the ER just to be allowed in for evaluation. She was warned by paramedics that she might end up spending the night on a bed in the hallway of the emergency room. This is indeed a public health crisis.

Meanwhile, Americans are still bridling at the reasonable restrictions being imposed by state governments. Mask mandates and business closures may not be to our liking, but they are necessary to bring this pandemic under control until the vaccine can start protecting large numbers of Americans. Many will argue that small businesses are being harmed by the prolonged shutdowns, and I truly sympathize. But allowing them to remain open is not the answer. Public money should be spent to help these businesses and their employees stay afloat during this crisis. I would be only too willing to have my taxes spent to help other Americans pay their bills. Yet Congress has been unable to pass COVID relief legislation, mostly because of an intransigent Republican Party led by Mitch McConnell.

The holidays have also likely contributed to the rise in COVID cases we are currently seeing. When families gather with members outside their immediate safe bubble, infections are more likely. It is a bitter pill to swallow not to see family members at the holidays. Yet only with these kinds of sacrifices will we see our way out of this tunnel.

I would urge all of us to continue taking this novel coronavirus as seriously as most of us did back in February and March when our world seemed to be put on pause. I worry not just about my mother or my family members but about the thousands of people who may die if we can’t get a handle on the spread of COVID-19. Please listen to health care providers. Mask up and stay home whenever possible. This sh*# is real!

Good Enough Parents

Lately our kids have been regaling my husband and me with our “greatest hits” of lame parenting. There was the time, for instance, when I barged into the house of my son’s friend and ascended three flights of stairs to ascertain the state of sobriety my son was in. My husband affectionately calls that the B and E, or Breaking and Entering, incident. Then there was the time my husband was dropping off my 16-year-old daughter at a boy’s house, and he insisted on waiting until the boy’s parents got home before leaving the teens to their own devices. Let’s face it. In the realm of strictness and overreaction as parents, my husband and I excel.

It’s not pleasant to revisit our failings as parents. I remember sometimes being so tired as a new parent that I would fall asleep on the floor of my daughter’s room while she was playing with her toys. I often forgot that the tooth fairy was supposed to come and deposit money under my child’s pillow. My kids even once complained that I fed them McDonald’s too often.

And I lost my patience – a lot. It was the virtue I prayed for constantly yet the one that has eluded me to this day. I will never forget, nor will my neighbors, the time I ran out the front door and down the block chasing after my son The Flash and yelling, “I’m going to kill you!” Ironically, I have no idea what I was so angry about. I can go from zero to screaming in less than ten seconds, but that’s nothing to brag about.

However, parenting mistakes usually reach their zenith during the children’s teenage years, at least as far as the kids are concerned. There was the time we grounded our 12-year-old daughter for a month for posting a four-letter-word on her AIM away message. The oldest child, she was our guinea pig. We had no idea what we were doing. She did not receive her first cell phone until freshman year of high school. She was also not allowed to go to the mall with her friends until high school. By college, she was more than ready to get away from our, in her view, overly strict rules.

The younger kids benefited from our experience over time, but mostly, let’s be honest, from our sheer exhaustion and unwillingness to be enforcers. For all of them, though, there were certain things we took a firm stand on for better or for worse. We did not tolerate underage drinking or drugs under any circumstances. This assured our place in the annals of uncool parenting.

Nowadays the kids will reminisce about the legendary groundings and other evidence that their parents were more like wardens at Rikers Island than guardians of their safety. They insist that when they become parents, they will do things differently. I seem to recall feeling the exact same way about my own parents when I was growing up.

It’s true that we were not perfect parents. If we’re being honest, most of us remember with embarrassment or regret those things we wish we’d done differently. Just recently, our neighbors bought their three young boys a trampoline for the backyard. Every day the boys are out there for hours squealing with delight as they jostle their brains around on the apparatus. When our kids were growing up, my husband refused to get a trampoline. He had known a young man who became paralyzed after a fall off of a trampoline, so in his mind, they were just too dangerous. But now, seeing how much enjoyment the neighbor children are experiencing, I think he regrets not giving that joy to his own children.

Still, I don’t think my husband and I were too bad as parents go. We tried to provide the material, emotional, and spiritual things our kids really needed. Our children are good, caring, gainfully employed individuals with friends and meaningful pursuits in their lives. They have a huge capacity for fun and laughter. And they love us in spite of all our foibles as parents. This Christmas, as we inevitably revisit some of our parenting lamest hits, I’ll be able to laugh, secure in the knowledge that as parents go, we’ve been good enough.