Zooming and showing gratitude during holidays
While I always look forward to Christmas and the year-end holidays, I confess that, for me, it has often been a season of stress.
The holiday rush hour traffic to and from stores ... the frantic shoppers inside the stores engaging in a retail demolition derby … the stringing of lights on our homes to make it look like we live in Time Square … the addressing, stamping and mailing of hundred of Christmas cards as if we were candidates in the Georgia Senate race runoff ... these and countless other Yuletide traditions can turn Bob Cratchit into Ebenezer Scrooge.
The holiday stress peaks on Christmas Eve, the longest night of the year. Silent night, holy night? Not when you are a daddy, like me. It is the night we dads learn that the three most terrifying words in the English language are: “Some assembly required.” We can’t sleep in heavenly peace. We are up at 2 a.m. trying to assemble toys that could only be put together by graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Even Christmas Day can be a challenge. I am blessed to the patriarch of a close-knit family. But we often spend at least part of Christmas Day engaged in what we call the annual family Christmas fight! Take it from me, serve the turkey with gravy and cranberry sauce, not politics!
But this year is different, of course. There’s a popular Christmas song entitled “There’s No
Place Like Home for the Holidays.” Thanks to the pandemic, this year home is the only place for the holidays.
We are shopping online. Instead of family gatherings and parties, we are all Zooming through the holidays.
Our family table will not be crowded for dinner on Christmas Day, unless you count faces in lap top screens, which of course we will.
If there is Christmas fight this year, it will be virtual.
But during this COVID Christmas, we may receive a surprise gift: a feeling of gratitude.
I am already receiving this gift, as I am filled with wonderful memories of all those stressful seasons
of Christmases past. The lonely stress of December 2020 makes me long for the crowded stress of Christmases not so long ago.
And so as I Zoom through this holiday season, I will be grateful for my faith, my family and friends, as I attend Christmas Eve church services on line and enjoy virtual parties and turkey dinner.
And I during these silent nights, I will be dreaming of Christmases yet to come after the advent of vaccines and the epiphany that the pandemic has passed.
I am even looking forward to the return of the annual family Christmas fight!
Bill Haltom lives and writes in Memphis and Monteagle, Tennessee.