Let’s just come right out and say it: Last year’s socially distanced holiday family gatherings were awful.
Let’s just come right out and say it: Last year’s socially distanced holiday family gatherings were awful.
F rom the perspective of Thanksgiving 2021, we can now openly acknowledge the truth we grinned and tried to ignore last year: Thanksgiving 2020 sucked.
Yes, a lot of us worried about elderly or immunocompromised relatives and tried to act responsibly. Many of us canceled our usual big family gatherings and made the safer choice to gather through Zoom or Skype or some other video-conferencing service, but it was a miserably subpar substitute for the traditional in-person celebration and meal. Yet another day and night with screens reminded us, as if any reminder were needed, of how much the pandemic had disrupted our lives, distanced us from friends and family, canceled parties, holidays, vacations, trips to restaurants and the movies — a whole slew of the things that make life worth living. Human beings were not meant to live their lives virtually, watching Netflix and eating delivery food night after night.
Last year, many of us put on brave faces and tried to act like this was fun, like Aunt Edna wasn’t mostly showing us her dining-room ceiling, Uncle Leo’s microphone wasn’t off, and our smaller, household-sized turkey was as good as our mother-in-law’s usual gargantuan bird.
But it wasn’t as good. Socially distanced holidays turned out to be like “distance learning” — a technologically glitchy simulacrum that was about 15 percent as satisfying as the real thing. Yes, seeing our loved ones’ faces and hearing their voices was better than nothing. And yes, a few things about last Thanksgiving were the same. There was still turkey. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade still happened (sort of). The Detroit Lions still lost.
But a Thanksgiving Day full of Zoom calls was suspiciously similar to a workday full of Zoom calls, a school day full of Zoom lessons, and weekends full of Zoom happy hours and Zoom birthday parties. After enough months of screen-based social interaction, you just want to say, “Zoom this.”
This year, with the pandemic largely in the rear-view mirror and vaccinations long since having become available, it’s safe to get back together. Chances are you’re vaccinated, and most of your family is, too. More than 99 percent of American seniors, more than 81 percent of American adults, and almost 80 percent of those over age twelve have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. That adds up to more than 442 million shots administered. If Uncle Benny still doesn’t want to get vaccinated, that’s his choice. He may be putting himself at risk, but you’re protected through your vaccination.
Last month, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that “about one in six adults (15 percent) say they will not be traveling for the holidays specifically due to concerns about the pandemic and about one in five (22 percent) say they will not be attending holiday gatherings with more than ten people this year due to pandemic concerns.”
But I am here to tell you: Don’t let SARS-CoV-2 ruin your Thanksgiving for a second year in a row.
Kids are at minimal risk of severe reactions to COVID-19, and they have been since the beginning of the pandemic. As the American Academy of Pediatrics reports, in its regularly updated statistics, “Among states reporting, children ranged from 1.7 percent to 4.1 percent of their total cumulated hospitalizations, and 0.1 percent to 1.9 percent of all their child COVID-19 cases resulted in hospitalization. Among states reporting, children were 0.00%-0.25% of all COVID-19 deaths, and 6 states reported zero child deaths. In states reporting, 0.00 percent to 0.03 percent of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in death.”
Your child is not going to end up in the hospital, much less dead, because they attended Thanksgiving dinner — at least as a result of COVID-19. Your child is at much greater risk of dying in an accident on the way to Grandma and Grandpa’s house than of dying after catching COVID-19 at Thanksgiving dinner. Don’t give in to fear. There are physical and mental-health risks to extended periods of isolation, too.
Life in the U.S has changed a lot over the past year — in some ways for the better, in others for the worse. Thanksgiving 2021 will bring its own challenges. The turkey will apparently require a down payment and a layaway plan, buying gasoline for the trip to Grandma’s house will require the sale of a kidney on the black market, and all of the Christmas presents are apparently still sitting on a cargo freighter stuck off the coast of Long Beach, Calif. Based upon how the year has gone for the Biden administration, there’s a good chance that the two turkeys pardoned by President Biden will turn out to have been the poultry equivalent of Bonnie and Clyde, a notorious duo known for a multi-state spree of armed — er, winged — feed robberies.
But whatever else happens, we can all be together again this year, free to hug, eat, toast, and collapse onto the couch in a tryptophan-induced coma — and that’s a major reason to be thankful.
(Yes, even if you’re a Detroit Lions fan.)