Better opened live

Christmas is my mother's holiday. There is not a time in the year when she isn't in some way preparing for it. She is far from religious, but the season infests her enough that, every year, she agrees to spend less on it and never does. It is a dependable charm, though one that financially strains her.

I inherited her joy of the season, if not necessarily the need to suffocate loved ones in gifts. I look forward to it the morning after Halloween, though I obey the edict against Christmas music until Thanksgiving.

I tiptoed around the topic of Christmas this year. Traditionally, we all gather around the stack of presents in my parents' modest living room, all thirteen of us, and open them in subdued chaos. My father used to try to video us opening them one at a time, but it would stretch the activity well into the evening if we tried that now. I don't know that my parents much watched these old videos anyway.

"We'll have Christmas," my mother said, "even if it is just you guys putting presents in your cars and leaving."

While I acknowledge the likely necessity of this and am glad that she has considered this, that isn't Christmas as I know it. But it hasn't been much of a year anyway. Amber and I avoided Easter with my family. We watched fireworks from a mile away, standing in the street in Rhinebeck. We had a few outdoor picnics, well socially distanced. Vacation did not occur. Halloween was a non-event. Days after winter begins in earnest, I cannot fathom a way to have Christmas with my family short of individual respirators, which is not in keeping with the festivities.

Yet another special moment lost, more potential memories on the fire, but better than losing my health or their lives. I know this, but I detest the continual erosion. I hate knowing my family's sure disappointment. It is grating that I spend forty hours a week with my coworkers and students--the latter who are not required to wear masks, wear them wrong when they do, and sometimes have the sort of hygiene one rarely sees outside feral children--but I cannot spend a few hours with my family.

My family seemed copacetic that I will not be joining them on Christmas day. They will be together, but they already spend regular time in one another's company. They assume that they all had COVID in March and April, contracted from one another, and aren't worried about it now. I don't know how accurate their assumption is; to my knowledge, none have received an antibody test. (I did, but I was randomly chosen and did not seek it.20200520) Owing to contact with an infected person at my day job, I recently took a COVID test, both uncomfortable and negative. My mother works at a school where there are weekly positive results, and my younger brother is a nurse in a prison, but it has not touched them directly. My niece Leelee will be home from college. I assume she had been tested by her school at some point.

To their way of thinking, I may be overcautious. There are times when I cannot disagree with this, though mostly because I desperately want to have Christmas.

I look forward to my mother's unhealthy French toast bake all year. I delight in the hill of presents that appears in their living room. I thrill to cheer for Santa on his firetruck on Christmas Eve--something that is apparently not a universal experience.

Next year, if the fates allow, we will all be vaccinated and immune. We won't need to be distanced. I will sit before that mountain of presents with all the vigor of a climber before Everest.

My mother has separated out all my presents to take with me to open, though I'm not sure when. I've never had this paradigm before, so I haven't considered the appropriate time. The presents seem like one of the least important parts of the day. At this point, I want for little that I could not buy on my own and anticipate few surprises that could change that. Opening them anywhere other than in front of my family seems rude. If they cannot see my expression as I open each, it feels as though I have not earned their generosity.

Next year, this will have felt silly but necessary, but it is heartbreaking to sacrifice yet another special day because our country could not do the right thing over the summer when it would have been much more manageable. The anti-maskers act as though this lost Christmas comes as a surprise, no matter how they were warned in March. They would fail the Marshmallow Test. For their short term, conspiratorial intransigence, more businesses have collapsed. The world stays ground to a halt until enough people get the vaccine that COVID-19 cannot propagate. (Though they throw up every bit of misinformation and threaten people in masks, they will do their best to get the vaccine for a virus they swore was fake; they are not only jackasses but bold hypocrites.)

Christmas is my last bastion of light before a long winter. I will spend it feeling irritated and depressed that I cannot be with my family, which will do nothing to improve my mood. I feel my mental health slipping. A missed night of quality sleep, a few days without sunlight, and the pressure of wanting something I cannot in good conscience have makes me feel slimy inside. Amber says a few idly comments, and I weave them together into a burial shroud, all the while reminding myself that she hadn't said anything bothersome. I cannot find my resilience.

Coupled with adding a year to my birthday tally, this is among the roughest times of the year for me. I know that there isn't much waiting for me until spring, just months of cold. I have finished revising my series to this point and the next addition (three others exist in some form, but that form is not close to publication), but Amber is still puzzling over We Shadows 2.0. I have received next to no commentary from my readers on the new versions; my revised books may not arrive on shelves quickly, so they are not an aspect of the coming months that can cheer me.

Even as I quell my anxiety over missing another holiday, I see a post from a friend, mourning a friend's parent's death from the virus. This should make me feel more confident that my caution is warranted. Intellectually, it does. Emotionally, it still feels as though I am losing the Prison's Dilemma. Most who gather will be unbothered and find this heightened carefulness clownish, but I do it for the sliver who will be affected--I do not think this describes my family, but I do not know and understand it is meant to be the moral thing to do.

As we walk to pick up Amber's car, charging in town, I tell her how I once had friends whose families threw massive Christmas parties. For one, I was not mentally healthy to feel comfortable doing anything beyond sitting by the cookies and telling myself not to keep eating them. (I also recall a massive bowl of eggnog that seemed to be 70 proof. As I am not a drinker, this didn't lubricate my social skills.) For another(20031228), everything seemed perfect and potent because I was young enough for it to feel immense. I want this coziness now. I kvetch to her that I had hoped people would be more extravagant in their holiday decorations to make up for the lack of socializing. Amber suggests that they don't have the money for the volume of electricity it would take to satisfy me. A belated $600 stimulus check will not change that.

The moment it is clear that immunity has taken hold on a large scale, the United States will go wild. There will be parties and concerts. Festivals will pop up everywhere. Every holiday will be so extreme as to be ludicrous. I will enjoy some, though with learned caution, but I most look forward to seeing my friends and family without fear. I have been half-starved for company since this began, invigorated over the summer when we could arrange something social. Now, the vaccine looms in the icicle months, the hunger to be in the presence of other people is so much stronger.

Small things have struck me in this anemic holiday season. I miss going to the mall a few times to see the decorations and feel the energy there as shoppers rush about, serenaded by Bing Crosby. I miss having something like a birthday with my friends, even though I wished to downplay this birthday to the degree I could. I regretted that my annual dinner with my parents could not be robust. I want the promise that there might be parties with caroling and mulled cider, though I cannot count many in my memory. I miss driving around from festive place to place, listening to the same twenty Christmas songs on the radio until I make my own mix of alternative and punk covers. We have nowhere much to be aside from work and the grocery store, so I never reached my frustration point with Delilah on the Christmas station.

Amber is not bothered by these things. Not having to socialize is a win for her, though she would prefer that it not come with a death toll. Her ideal holiday season might be little different than it has been this year--though she likes the way we do Christmas itself, seeing her mother and sister, then spending the rest of the day with my sprawling family. Her sister could not come to New York this year, so Amber mailed her a box of presents to make up for it. We have received a steady flow of packages from her family, though no more than is usual.

This year, it seems as though people would like to forget this holiday exists. I bought gifts from Etsy sellers to balance out having to throw money at the monopolies for things available nowhere I am willing to go. I didn't feel comfortable going into any store in my town, knowing that they are too snugly confined to be safe. Since February, I haven't had a haircut because my barber had half her intestines removed due to medical complications. I do not want to sneeze and read her epitaph in a week, nor do I wish to get a haircut and respiratory infection with the same snip.

I resent that my niblings will have this year in their childhood Christmas memories, though I don't know how much different it is for them. They haven't had regular school since March and have adjusted to worse than this. They may not notice, especially as they will be seeing their grandparents on the day.

Next year, gods willing, I will sing a different tune. The world won't be wholly normal. We won't forget what this year brought us, but we will be able to be together again without fear of killing our loved ones with a virus. In a Christmas movie, there would be some Ghost of Christmas Future imparting a moral lesson here, but all the ghosts I've heard whisper that they would have preferred that they hadn't died of COVID. That will have to serve as moral enough.

last watched: Cells at Work
reading: Piercing the Darkness