Decorating for COVID Christmas
Will this be our only COVID Christmas? Hard to say. It started at just the right time with the WHO announcement on January 9th that there was a mysterious virus in Wuhan, China. The first case of the Coronavirus hit our shores, from a man returning from Wuhan on January 15th and getting diagnosed by CDC on January 21st. By then four had died in China and the Chinese were sort of forced to disclose their 200 known cases and thereby declare the novel virus as a 2019 phenomenon such that the affliction became known as COVID-19. This very rapidly evolved into a Global Health Emergency on January 31st as declared by WHO. On March 11th WHO upgraded the situation to a Global Pandemic. That designation has three important criteria, illness resulting in death, sustained person-to-person spread and worldwide spread. At that time the first two had clearly been met, and the third was soon to become self-evident. On March 19th, my adopted new state of California announced a statewide stay-at-home order. By May 28th, deaths across the United States exceeded 100,000 with the U.S. representing a disproportionately high 25% of worldwide deaths. As we have now passed the 300,000 deaths mark in this country, we have dropped to a mere 18.5% of the global death toll with total cases still up at 23%. Keep in mind that U.S. population is a slight 4.2% of the global population, which clearly puts us in first place in the COVID department as we head into the yearend turn.
The only sources worth listening to on the subject suggest that we will be laboring under the harsh hand of COVID for most of 2021, with the return to “normalcy” probably not coming until at least the 4th Quarter. I think we are all counting on the successful rollout of the various vaccines to put a stake through the heart of the virus, but then we really don’t have assurances yet of how long that will take for the 327 million people in the U.S., much less the 7.8 billion people on the face of the Earth. I find that conversations with people of a like age (sexagenarians) tends to suggest that despite being a supposedly vulnerable population, we do not think we will get immunized until sometime in the second quarter. If Pfizer does not feel they can deliver beyond the first 100 million doses (50 million souls) until June, that does not bode well for full national immunization in 2021. We all want herd immunity even though we don’t really understand it. As Joey from Friends would say, I think at this stage it is a moo point.
As for this Christmas season, we are hunkered down on our hilltop much as everyone is similarly hunkered down on their respective figurative hilltops. We will see a few close-by relatives, but as of today, a mere week ahead of the blessed birthday of Christ, we have very few plans made to bring anyone together to share holiday cheer. Nevertheless, and despite being in the midst of a more involved deck renovation than we expected, complete with protective craft paper laid down across the kitchen and living room, we have still decorated for the season. This is the first Christmas we are spending in our new home. We have spent many Christmases here already, but it has never been our home until now. This time it is somehow more personal and every decoration is thought out and placed with care and intent. I have defaulted to the outdoor decorations and Kim has been in charge of the inside decorations. My objective has been to let the neighborhood know that we celebrate the holidays and Kim’s objective has been to warm our home and make it a festive place for us to feel the holiday season in our hearts. In some ways, decorating for ourselves has been a good test. There is nothing to prove to anyone, it is all just to please ourselves. That has meant that we have focused on things that both speak to us about the holidays and remind us of the good family times we have enjoyed together in the past.
The two most emblematic decorations are our Christmas tree and our ornaments, and the two are connected and disconnected all at once. We have opted against a traditional Christmas tree. Even though we have used a pre-lighted artificial tree that is stored in the garage, we chose not to use that, but rather to use a Mexican steel tree reminiscent of out Mexican patio lanterns with their bejeweled colored lights and cut-out beams of light emanating from it in the dark. We very much like this faux tree and it feels very appropriate for our new Californian lifestyle, but there is no ability to place cherished ornaments on the metal pointed “branches”. So Kim has purchased the less-than-traditional Christmas ornament ladder. It is an ornamental metal and wood ladder that leans against the wall and on which she has arrayed all her favorite and memorable ornaments for display.
Christmas has always reminded me of my youth. The era of my youth was the era of polio and the national vaccine pioneered first by Jonas Salk and then improved on by Albert Sabin. We got the shot from Salk and then took the permanent oral vaccine from Sabin. Sabin on Sunday was a national motto to encourage Americans to all stay out of the iron lungs, which are now no longer even in existence (I think I read that there is one survivor still using the last of the iron lungs). How strange that all these years later we are once again faced with a national obligation to get out the vaccine to as many Americans as possible. The world just keeps on turning and history keeps repeating itself.
I suspect that by this time next year we will either be normalizing how we deal with COVID vaccines and COVID holidays or we will be far enough past the crisis that we all breathe a collective sigh of relief and get back to at least family gatherings. What does that Christmas carol say? Repeat the sounding joy! By then the world will be in desperate need of all the joy to the world that we can all muster, having suffered almost two years of Coronavirus Congestion. How many people will have fallen to the virus by then? I will guess that the world death toll will exceed 3 million and the U.S. toll will be over 500,000 (17%) as our lead gets dwindled by our medical prosperity relative to the rest of the world at large. If that’s where we end up we will all be fortunate and we might be decorating for our first post-COVID Christmas.