My family-small, granted, daughter, granddaughter, SIL won’t be doing any of their usual gatherings for either Thanksgiving or Christmas and we usually had a 7 members of a divorced two parent family joint gathering for each, alternating between the two houses large enough.
So, no Thanksgiving for me. I’m good with that. It’s the right thing to do for all. I live with a housemate-she and I will stock up on some good Trader Joe’s entrees and appetizers, crank up the oven, use paper plates and have an easy, lazy day.
The same size 3 generation family Christmas gathering won’t be happening either. I will (hopefully) get to spend Boxing Day with my granddaughter, daughter and SIL, as I did last year, because both households strictly isolate and operate as a self-contained bubble. No fanfare though.
Well, the Nanny canceled on us for Thanksgiving, so it looks like it’s just me and Sr. Weasel, the baby, and Boston Market. I don’t really feel like making an elaborate dinner for two.
We rented a house on Martha’s Vineyard and will just have the two of us out there. We’ll bring all our food, make a scaled back Thanksgiving dinner, and spend time hanging out, walking on the beach, and exploring some of the more remote parts of the island.
My family is Jewish, so no big holiday gatherings for my side. My wife wants to visit her dad but we haven’t worked out any logistics. It’ll probably be a limited visit, not a big meal, but something.
My sister and I had “the talk” the day before Election Day. We spent about a half hour trying to figure out how the family could celebrate Thanksgiving and/or Christmas together. It is just too risky. We siblings are all in our 60’s and my mom is in her mid-90s. It wouldn’t be worth the travel to come together for a brief, socially distanced meal. We usually all come together at my mom’s and spend a few days together.
We will try to get something going on Zoom the day of, but it won’t be the same…
Oh well, better to sacrifice now in order to be together multiple times in the future.
Thanksgiving and Christmas will just be our household, almost certainly. However, it’s our 20th wedding anniversary in early Dec and I’d like to do SOMETHING. I think we are going to bank on the idea that it’s people, not surfaces, that are the greatest danger, and rent a fancy hotel for a night. Son can go to Grandma’s. We will eat takeout and just be somewhere different for the first time since March.
If this sort of tradition caught on it would be one of the few positive developments caused by COVID. We decided to cancel Christmas last year and it was blissful. This year, all the holidays will be as easy and lazy as we can pull off.
I haven’t seen my six year old grandson in a year (NOT all Covid’s fault, but it didn’t help). Now I’m invited to his birthday party on Saturday, with the side of his family I don’t know.
I bought him some gifts, but I’m thinking maybe just drop them off?
And I’m quite willing to let Thanksgiving go. It’s Christmas that worries me.
Thought this as good a place to post this as any. Everyone I know is taking some degree of (IMO) pretty serious precautions. I have one sister, who has been (IMO) RIDICULOUSLY over-the-top cautious. Name any precaution - she has taken it.
You know the punchline - she just got a positive diagnosis. Absolutely crazy shit. Makes it an incredible challenge to figure out what limitations are too many or not enough.
Oh yeah - our holiday plans figure to be pretty much just the 2 of us. We’ve been seeing a couple of other people on a limited basis. Will likely continue to decide day by day.
Follow up (again): After I declined, my niece posted some stupid meme basically stating our governor can’t tell us what to do, unless he pays our bills, we’re going to celebrate as a family because people may not be alive next year.
And did not see the irony in that all.
My mom is planning on going over there.
The following Thursday, my daughter is coming up for her birthday. I told mom that unless she decides to stay home, she will not see her favorite grandchild, who she has not seen in person since August. “What if I get tested?” Fourteen days, lady, fourteen days.
Christmas is still unknown. At this point, we’ve discussed porch dropped presents and zooming. Daughter and partner will be coming back up for a few days and since mom will be past the after-Thanksgiving quarantine, she is invited over here. I can’t do the “real” Christmas Dinner (turkey is my kryptonite), but have offered alternative menus.
I posted in Mundane a few weeks ago that we were going to do Thanksgiving early. The first week of November was in the 60s and 70s. It had been in the 20s and 30s with snow the week before! So I decided to do an outdoor, early Thanksgiving since it was so nice out. It was perfect. We didn’t go all out like regular Thanksgiving. I bought a bunch of fried chicken from the grocery deli and everyone filled in the sides. If we hadn’t done this, we wouldn’t have done Thanksgiving at all.
Now Christmas is on the horizon. I have a daughter and her family that lives 150 miles away and I have other grandchildren that live close by. We always get together for a big Christmas either the week before or after the 25th since they have so many other obligations. We all went back and forth about this year and about 3 weeks ago we kind of planned on doing it as usual. Then the governor set some new restrictions because it’s getting worse out there. My daughter’s kids are all distance learning full-time now and her BF is laid off from his job as a restaurant manager.
Then I had a brainstorm! Why not Christmas in July?! Who knows if things will be any better by then. But we can at least be outside. As long as we can be together as a family, the day we do it doesn’t matter. Also, the kids are just overloaded with gifts and celebrations with other family and their parents on Christmas. One of my grandsons has a birthday a week before Christmas so that’s even more for him.
I wasn’t feeling Christmas this year at all anyway. Which is unusual for me. I LOVE every aspect of Christmas. But the whole thing seemed dreadful this year. So when everyone agreed with Christmas in July, a huge weight was lifted from my shoulders. The kids are acutally excited about it.
This is a great idea. One of the things about all these modified get-togethers is that they just aren’t that much fun when you’re stressing about the rules the whole time. Also, you made me regret buying a turkey for my four person family - now I want to just order some fried chicken from the grocery store and do that.
Usually I spend Thanksgiving with my Aunt (who is one of my favorite people) and we are both bummed we won’t see each other this year. But I think not having Thanksgiving be a normal event this year has made us realize how arbitrary holidays really are. My dog-loving Aunt has proposed we celebrate wolfenoot instead of Thanksgiving from now on.
What is wolfenoot you ask? It’s a holiday invented by a 7-year-old boy that involves roasted meats, searching for presents, and being nice to dogs. Celebrated the 23rd of November.
My younger cousin is hosting Thanksgiving this year. She’s been keeping careful watch over her family’s health, especially with a eight month old in the mix.
My aunt and uncle are taking precautions themselves, and I’m getting tested on Saturday (for the first time!). Together, we’ll be less than ten people, and if my cousin doesn’t mind me being there, I’m not going to second-guess her; she’s got more at stake than I do, and her judgment is pretty solid.
Originally, Thanksgiving plans were just the family (me/wife/kid). But daughter’s BF has become part of our isolation “pod” over the last 6 months, and he lives with his Mom (just the two of them). They have very little social contact outside their house. It seems we’re already long past any microbe exchange windows with them, and there’s little danger having BF and Mom over for TG dinner. We’re just modifying somewhat and eating dispersed at separate tray tables in the den, rather than gathered around a table facing each other.
Maybe I shouldn’t, but his Mom lost her job due to Covid effects, a fancy dinner would be a financial burden for them, and I hate for her to sit at home alone. Stone me if you must – sigh. Sometimes these decisions aren’t as clear-cut as we wish.
It’s taken a cousin currently in the ICU, intubated yesterday due to a collapsed lung, for my future son-in-law’s family to realize “Hey, guess this is serious”.
Usually, any reason for a get together brings all 70+ of his family up here together and until now moved between believing COVID is a hoax to it’s something, but way overblown.
They decided to not have Thanksgiving.
One Auntie has already done turkey door drops so family members can make their own, the group chat has already divvied up who will make what and door drop. Then the plan is Zooming during dinner.
Until today, I’d been wavering, but sort of assuming that we’d stick to the plans made a few months ago: my husband works, so I’d drive 3.5 hours to my daughter’s college, and she and I would fly an hour to spend Thanksgiving with my mom, my sister, and her family. We were all set with fans and outdoor heaters and paper plates and masks and distancing rules. But shit has really hit the fan this week, a friend tested positive two weeks ago and has had a 102 fever ever since, my school district was sent home early today because of six positive cases, every expert is telling me to stay home, so … Zoom it is. My family of three will watch the parade and the dog show, cook and eat and drink and nap.
As somebody on TV said this morning, Thanksgiving on Zoom is better than Christmas on a ventilator.
We were going to have one guest for Thanksgiving, eschewing the usual big get-together that I noted upthread. But yesterday she canceled, which was also the day I recieved some pretty bad news about my grandfather, as well as some other shit that just made it an all-around bad day. So I kind of snapped.
My wife still wants to cook the turkey and make the usual assortment of sides and yadda yadda yadda but goddamit my heart just isn’t in it this year. Since I’m the chef in the family what she really means is that she wants me to do the pony work like I usually do. I probably will, but I really really don’t want to.
Our pattern for the past several years is that my wife, son, and I celebrate Thanksgiving with my extended family up here in the DC area, and we celebrate Christmas with my wife’s extended family in Florida.
My clan decided all the way back in late September that there would be no big Thanksgiving dinner this year on account of Covid, so I’ll be celebrating with just my wife and son.
My wife’s family will be getting together for Christmas. We decided weeks ago that we wouldn’t be joining them. We usually fly down, but we aren’t ready to risk airports and planes. And it would be an 800-mile drive, which would be hard to do in a day, and we aren’t ready to trust hotels either. But the big factor is, they’re all conservative evangelical Trumpers, and we don’t trust their willingness to stay safe.
With any luck, next year will be better, and I want as many of us as possible to be alive and in good health when Thanksgiving 2021 rolls around. In the words of Vampire Weekend, “ I don’t wanna live like this, but I don’t wanna die. ” So for the next few months at least, we stay in our bubble.
At this point, I want my holiday plans to be no plans at all.
My sister is the one that worries me. She treats the pandemic as if it is a joke and continues traveling, doing everything, interacting with people, going into restaurants, etc. almost just as before, and inviting other people to join her. If there were anyone in our family who would be a silent spreader, it would be her. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t want her to visit us and every time she drops by - for minutes or hours - it makes me nervous. And she may hang out with us a long while during Thanksgiving and Christmas.