Pat Taub
GUEST POST By JANET WEIL
“All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth” – popular song by Donald Yetter Gardner, 1944
All I want for this Hanukah/Christmas season is two injections of COVID vaccine. Well, not all – I want the vaccine for my son the paramedic, my 99-year-old father-in-law, my husband about to turn 70, medical workers, and everyone else, even the maskless jerks making things worse.
When I wrote this December 2019 blog post, I was deeply concerned about the climate and environmental impacts caused by winter holiday consumption. I still am. But now the anxiety at the top of my mind, along with probably every reader of this blog, is the worsening COVID-19 pandemic. I’m staying home – it’s online buying or contactless pickup only for my household during this strange, plague-haunted winter.
One of my favorite environmental organizations, Center for Biological Diversity , has a thoughtful guide on simplifying and truly enjoying the holidays: I wish this could be shared as often as the horrible buy-buy-buy commercials all over TV and the internet. How much “Christmas crap” (as I call it) might never have been produced, sparing both humans and the environment?
Here are a few changes I’ve made in the approach to “a very COVID” Christmas (and Hanukkah).
Mourn the dead.
It’s hard right now, to feel the reality of the hundreds of thousands of Americans (let alone millions of others) who have died from this terrible new disease. I read obituaries and take time to feel some of the mostly unspoken grief we are all carrying.
Front-line health care workers who died from Covid, Guardian
Cherish what is good in my life.
Recent highlights: photographing nature (these wild mushrooms, for instance) in the parking lot of a shopping center where I go for walks, not for shopping trips these days; enjoying a Thanksgiving zoom call with extended family. I appreciate health and loved ones as never before.
Remember those with far less:
The unhoused, prisoners, migrant parents separated from their children, people in war zones, patients in the hospital or nursing homes. It’s an immediate mental check on a slide into self-pity.
Give mindfully:
For example, I contributed to UNICEF in my father-in-law’s honor, paying for dozens of polio vaccines for children in conflict zones. It’s a gift he’ll appreciate.
Next year, maybe I’ll be able to donate money for COVID vaccines. And then… And then… so many things I want to do, we all want to do. Until those brighter days, I know that I can, we all can, build resilience for other challenges to come. As Pat Taub reminds us, “We can do hard things.”
I’ll end by quoting one of our WOW blog community members, Rene Baron Heimer:
I am going to make our usual family dinner of steaks, potatoes and sides. Plus desserts. I’ll deliver them to my two daughters and families at Christmas. … I feel good about bringing them a wonderful meal that they won’t have to cook themselves. I will leave their gifts. I hope to get some air hugs and wind-blown kisses in return. Keeping each other safe is of utmost importance this year.
Amen to that.
