Thanksgiving must become Zoomsgiving

We Röhms are a small but close family. We make a big deal about family Thanksgivings and Christmases.

Elisabeth, our eldest, is an actress who, together with our granddaughter, Easton, lives in Los Angeles. Lucas, who went to UC San Diego, now lives in Portland where he runs his web services business called Mission Bay Media. And, Olivia, our youngest, lives in Denver, where she works as a designer for Restoration Hardware. While careful about COVID-19, avid mask wearers and hand washers all, they work, travel and see friends, as they should, being healthy, young adults.

We had planned to meet in Vail for a family Thanksgiving this year. Like so many others, our plans were canceled due to the pandemic.

While generally in good health and San Diego “fit,” I have some upper respiratory issues, including asthma, and my husband just celebrated his 80th birthday. In short, we are both “high risk” for COVID-19.

Our kids worry about us in an endearing way, reminiscent of our fretting and fussing over them when they were young. The three of them, especially our son, have decided it’s too dangerous for us to be exposed to them, until we are vaccinated. They say they couldn’t live with themselves if they gave us this disease. We’ve had a few false starts over these past 11 months — making plans, trying to figure out how to have a safe gettogether, only to cancel plans as the infection rate and death toll continue to rise.

But we’ve adjusted. We have a family text going so we can share and communicate daily. Sometimes it’s a joke, sometimes a meme, sometimes a subject more serious.

We FaceTime, Zoom meet and talk on the phone. All together or one on one, just for fun or as needed. We all look forward to the time in the near future when we can hug again.

In the meantime, we’re planning our

Zoomsgiving! We will all make the same menu, do joint prep via Zoom, then put our laptops on the table so we can eat together, albeit virtually.

In years past, I usually made the feast. A couple of years ago, when I had shoulder surgery and my arm was in a sling, the three siblings made Thanksgiving dinner together. In retrospect, that was a dry run for 2020, although we didn’t know it at the time.

And, we’ve had a little practice lately, as we had two Zoom birthdays in November.

This may be the hardest of all the adaptations we have made over the years because there is nothing like when your grown children, who now tower over you, hug you with the inherent strength of decades of shared experiences, successes, failures, memories and love. But the pandemic is temporary. A reminder, perhaps, that everything changes all the time and we human beings find a way to go on.

The way things are going, seems like Christmas will be virtual too. We’ll start thinking about that on Dec. 1.

Jessica Röhm, La Jolla after Thanksgiving. I don’t care what Target and Walmart do. They can start before Halloween if they want, but not me.

Charlie Ballbach, Santee