Christmas can be a circuit breaker for the fury and suspicion

Nobody was overly worried about the last dates for An Post this year. No one was panicking about the final days for buying the few bits online, or for ordering your free-range turkey from the butcher. Those kinds of calculations all feel very 2019 now.

The key dates to remember in 2021 were December 14th, the last safe date to get a close contact notification or you’d have been goosed. December 15th: the last day for a positive PCR so you wouldn’t be spending today with a tinfoil-covered turkey plate in your room with the hum of a HEPA filter for company.

December 18th: the final opportunity to get your booster to ensure optimum protection for Christmas Day. It was like Squid Game, someone on Twitter said, except it’s everyone trying not to be a close contact before they go home for the break. No one was worrying about what they’d get for Christmas, so long as it wasn’t Omicron.

Covid-19's side effects are weird and inconstant, but one of the strangest was the way it managed to silo us into unhappy tribes, united by an inchoate sense of rage

This is a Christmas like no other – except for the one in 2020. And possibly the one in 2022. It is a season of tempered expectations and making the best of it, of nativity plays filmed on someone’s iPhone involving small masked shepherds and miniature wise (far-wiser-than-they-should-be) men and women, most of whom can’t remember a time before Covid.

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It's a time for giving, a time for forgiving and, as Cliff Richard didn't say, a time for Zooms with the grandchildren whom you haven't hugged in real life yet, and who are already losing their baby fat.

Understandably, given the uneven distribution of the burden of loss and labour during this pandemic, there is a hierarchy of stuff you’re allowed to complain about. Things like cancelled gigs and meals out are way down at the bottom. It’s “peak 2021” to feel sad about anything that isn’t life or death when ICUs are preparing for war, you see.

The thing is, though, one person’s frippery is someone else’s livelihood and someone else’s mental health outlet. Even during this miserable year, when doing anything purely for pleasure outside the walls of your house felt shameful, seizing moments of joy is still what makes us human.

I read this week that North Korea outlawed laughter for 11 days during the mourning period for the 10th anniversary of Kim Jong-il, and I found myself thinking: well, at least Nphet hasn't banned that.

Covid-19’s side effects are weird and inconstant, but one of the strangest was the way it managed to silo us into unhappy tribes, united by an inchoate sense of rage and shared frustration, and pitted against one another in some imaginary battle for the moral high ground.

The frontliners versus the remote workers. The vaccinated versus the unvaccinated. The people who lost their jobs versus the civil servants who didn’t. The people doing it all at home versus the ones not pulling their weight. The parents who wanted their children back in school versus the teachers who felt they were being treated like babysitters.

The publicans and restaurateurs versus the politicians and public health authorities who couldn’t make up their minds. The public versus itself.

The real legacy of Covid is the more than 5,800 empty chairs at Christmas dinner tables

From the pandemic’s earliest days, we absorbed the message that the real threat we were fighting wasn’t so much the virus, as other folk.

A lot of people seemed to imagine they were the last ones in the country being fully compliant with the rules, while the rest of us were having house parties and dancing on top of fire hydrants and encouraging our unvaccinated children to sneeze all over the fresh produce aisle or lick each other’s faces in creche. “The public” was everyone else, and they were determined to mess it up.

Somehow, though, we battled through it. After a year of metaphorically tearing each other apart, Christmas is a circuit breaker for the fury and the suspicion. There is a universality to the traditions of the season which reminds us that, despite everything, we’re not actually that different to one another.

In the end, we’re all just collections of stardust, busy pulling the blow-up mattress out of the press, or making a mad dash to Penneys for fluffy scarves, or googling cooking times for turkey. We tie ourselves in knots trying to make the day perfect, when really what we want is the thing we haven’t been allowed to have. Just to be around the people we love and the ones who drive us mad in the best possible ways.

For some, that won't happen today. There are the unlucky thousands who missed the optimum date to get a close contact or positive PCR notification, so now they're confined to the bedroom with Netflix and trays outside the door.

Missing, too, are the emigrants who didn’t make it home this year. And then there are those who won’t ever be home again. The real legacy of Covid is the more than 5,800 empty chairs at Christmas dinner tables.

A letter to Santa from a child whose dad died went viral recently on Twitter. “To Santa,” it read. “As you know it’s Christmas time and I’ll be sending you my list of presents I’d like. This year has been quite difficult for me and my family. So would it be okay if I got something for my mum? Thanks.”

You see something like that, and you remember. Even when the days feel way too long, we’re more aware than ever that the number we are allocated is finite. Beneath the roar and tutting and muttering of other people’s judgement, there’s a thrum of anxiety running through all of us that life is passing us by.

For today, at least, let’s remember that we’re all part of a single tribe of lonely, joyful, flawed, anxious humans, just trying to hold on to the magic where we can.