My family hails from the Midwest. We celebrate the holiday like most other families. We gather. We eat. We share gifts. Laughs. Moments. The thing we don't do well is talk. In a time where rules and routines become matters of life and death, the unspoken can easily carry an enormous weight.
This year presents a year and a challenge like no other for those of soft-spoken Midwestern descent. We have the freedom to gather but an unending complexity of rules to abide by. Masking. Distancing. Testing. These new gates keep our family from the traditions of the past. Protections carefully considered for potential years ahead for those who are hanging by threads to this life. A seemingly simple decision holding unforeseeable ripples for the fragile.
In between are the children. Some so young they can barely remember a Christmas without masks, rules, and risks to calculate. Forced to bear the burden of being a gift for the elders and a responsibility for the parents, they stride ever so gently into each new experience, increasingly aware that the invisible danger hangs over each tradition, ever so slightly. Parents, eager to assure them that the abnormal is something better accepted than fought, portray the rules as routine. Fully aware they are anything but.
I will celebrate this holiday divorced from the nuclear family I was raised in. A sign of the time we are all persevering through. My only child, deprived of one set of grandparents to perhaps protect another, a more delicate set. My adult siblings, caught in between.
In the end, family is malleable. Sculpture formed through words and deeds, not blood. Now, we make each season and each tradition out of the best of what we have to bear. This year, it may just be my child and my partner with whom I share the bounty of a Christmas morning. But I know the rest of my family, whether chosen or blood, lay waiting. Somewhere, more protected in the distance. In a future that seems each year farther away. And yet, there is hope for something more. Something closer. That is the Christmas Spirit that will hold my family this year.
I wish all of yours the very same hope. And that we will all see days much simpler and more joyous ahead.
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The challenge is to drive activity and engagement on the new front-end. Give it a try, it's harmless.