Hello, friends. I hope you’ve all had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday, socially-distanced, of course. Indeed I’ve written before that I don’t blame anyone for wanting to gather during the holidays, even under these dire COVID circumstances. Because it’s been a really rough year, and human beings are social animals (even for the introverted me). Certainly, the “right” thing to do would be to not gather at all, but we wouldn’t be in this predicament in the first place if every American did what was right far earlier during this pandemic.
We have to accept reality: people are going to get together for the holidays. Christmas season is next.
It comes down to how much risk you are willing to take, and amongst my friend group, we chose a short gathering for Thanksgiving, with the appropriate masks and precautions (my own family never celebrated Thanksgiving). We hung out for about an hour at a friend’s house, and then individually took home food to-go. Later on we joined a Zoom session as the replacement for chatting over the dinner table. It was the best we could do under the circumstances, and most importantly, everyone felt good about it instead of someone stressing they are taking an undue risk.
It’ll be fun to look back at the pictures from this year and laugh at how peculiar it all is. A moment in our lives that hopefully is an anomalous blip, rather than a new normal.
Celebrations aside, I took the entire Thanksgiving week off work, so it was nice to have some leisure time to recharge the mind and body batteries. At first I was hesitant to even take the days off because I can’t go anywhere for obvious reasons. Normally I’d be off to Asia for the week, or at least not stuck at home the entire time. Instead, the only difference from work in taking vacation during COVID is that I don’t have to follow the online work channels for eight hours out of the day.
That being said, the respite from work allowed me to get the last bit of things I need to completely finish the moving process that started almost a month ago. It’s always nice to able to go to IKEA on a weekday when there’s far less people, and I can flaneur through the showrooms unbothered by crowds.
There’s one more month to go on this crazy year. I am grateful that me and the people close to me are still healthy and gainfully employed. That’s all we can ask for.
Barren racks.