Couples do Christmas online, in person if ‘lucky’ during CanadaU.S. border closure

Like many couples, Kaelynn Ball and Dave Hogsten will be enjoying a leisurely breakfast on Christmas Day before opening presents. In their case, they’ll be watching each other prepare their own meals on a screen as they spend hours together while she is at home in Canada and he is in the United States.

Ball, of Surrey, B.C., met Hogsten online on Dec. 26, 2018, before she travelled to his home in Baltimore, Md., six months later and then again last Christmas, when she presented his family with maple syrup from Canada.

Hogsten proposed during a visit to Ball’s home in February, around the time concerns about a new and deadly coronavirus were spreading around the globe, and forced the closure of the Canada-U.S. border to nonessential travel in mid-March.

Ball, 24, and Hogsten, 37, were among cross-border couples and families that met last summer in Surrey at Peace Arch Park, a no-quarantine-required international loophole where Canadians — under the watchful eye of RCMP officers — could meet with their loved ones in Washington state.

Now, Ball has created an online community of couples, including many from around the U.S. that she met at the park, so they can share their experiences of navigating a longdistance relationship during a pandemic.

“People have been able to share their stories and connect with each other and say, ‘What’s been hard about this year? What’s been good about this year?”’

Her suggestions for date nights via Zoom or Skype are a big hit.

“We do board game nights, video game nights. We’re doing a Mexican night. We’re making margaritas and we’re getting takeout,” she said. “We’re always mixing it up, and I’ve had a lot of people actually message me and say, ‘Wow, that’s a great idea.”’

Ball and Hogsten have even done a pretend pub-crawl to keep things interesting while spending so much time onscreen and not knowing when they’ll see each other in person.

She also supports an online group called Faces of Advocacy, which lobbied the federal government to ease border restrictions in October so family members and couples in a long-term relationship could see each other, as long as they quarantine for 14 days.