Circle the date: Feb. 15, 2021.
The Family Day holiday.
Christmas delayed.
With luck, or at least self-discipline, the outlook will be brighter then and we’ll be able to gather to do the things we traditionally do as families Dec. 25 — accidentally tossing winning scratch ’n’ win tickets in the fireplace, surreptitiously stuffing Brussels sprouts down the chesterfield, hitting foul balls instead of home runs with our gift selections. (“I love it. It’s perfect. Did you keep the receipt?”)
Surely it will be brighter then than it was Tuesday, when we awoke to an appropriately grey, grim, socked-in morning, the bad taste of Monday’s news still in our mouths.
That is, in the interest of containing COVID-19, the restrictions B.C. has been living under for the past three weeks will continue until Jan. 8. Among other things, that means nobody who doesn’t already live in your house is supposed to come over for Christmas — or any other day, for that matter. The only exception applies to those who live alone; they get a bubble of one or two others.
No, you can’t go to your kids’ home, or your parents’ home, and they can’t go to yours.
No, you can’t go to a restaurant or bar with a friend or anyone else you don’t live with.
No, you can’t keep mixing with the people in your six-person bubbles, not for now. Those were the old new rules, not the new new rules. In reality, those bubbles often looked more like the overlapping circles of a Venn diagram anyway, an imperfect way to break the chains of transmission.
But how many will comply? As it is, it’s not just the banner-waving, coughing-on-the-server, anti-mask conspiracy nuts who are poking holes in the pandemic dike. It’s the rest of us, whether through ignorance, selective hearing, or a myopic refusal to look at the big picture. Some people approach Dr. Bonnie’s measures as though they’re the equivalent of the tax code, a game to be worked. Instead of trying to protect their loved ones by doing one simple thing — staying away from others as much as possible — they focus on wriggling through loopholes or bleating about regulatory inequities. Or sometimes they just cheat because they’re blue.
Are we sad? Of course we are. We’re 10 months into a pandemic, it’s raining and the solstice, the darkest time of the year, is just 12 days away. People are weary and anxious. Your last Zoom call looked like the Brady Bunch Funeral Special. You haven’t seen so many gloomy faces since the Canucks lost Game 7 to the Bruins. Even Mary Poppins would hit the bottle right about now.
We all want to be with the ones we love at Christmas, but at what cost? I haven’t hugged my 100-year-old mother in over a year, and it would break my heart if I never get to do so again, but not as much as it would break my heart to be the one who unwittingly brings COVID into her care home. The idea is to stay apart not because we don’t care for each other, but because we do.
At the moment, it feels like we’re in an old war movie, trying to hold off an ever-strengthening enemy just long enough for reinforcements to come riding over the horizon, brandishing vaccines. If we hold it together, maybe we’ll be in a position to unpucker enough to gather as families for Family Day.
It will be like old times. Festering grievances will erupt anew. Someone will spend all day in the kitchen, but be chastised for the lumpy gravy. A drunken uncle will say something that will inspire A) an embarrassed silence, or B) homicide. Someone will ask “Do these pants make my butt look big?” to which someone else will reply “Blame the pandemic, not the pants” and the conversation will go south from there.
It will be wonderful. Hang on.
