A Quaker Covid Christmas

Your latest Christmas Tree decoration?
(visualisation of SARS-CoV-2 virus by US CDC)

It’s Christmas time. It’s a pandemic. It seems to have quite a lot of people in something of a tizzy.

Our friends across the Atlantic have already negotiated this with their Thanksgiving holidays, when it is common – even traditional – for families to come together, even if they live far apart. Many families here in Britain are in the habit of doing the same at Christmas, and certainly families who do live near one another often get together in larger family gatherings than is their habit at other times of year. The fact it has become a secular holiday, as well as a sacred festival for most Christians, means that this extends over more of the population than one might think by looking at religious demographics.

To an awful lot of people, Christmas isn’t Christmas without household mixing. For the religiously observant, busy services on Christmas Eve bring many households into close proximity. For lots of people, religious or otherwise, Christmas is when family comes together, even if normally spread out. Students return to the family home for Christmas, and even those children who are grown and settled in new lives often do the same. Where the next generation has brought forth their own new generation, the older generation might be hosted by their children, and see their grandchildren. This is normal, expected even – to the extent that childless people who spend Christmas alone, even as a couple, are sometimes pitied at best, thought strange at worst. Charities put a lot of effort into making sure people who don’t want to spend Christmas alone – or who other people think oughtn’t to spend Christmas alone – don’t have to do so.

Covid, Mental Health, Relgion and Spiritual Communities

The public health issues gripping the world have been hard on a lot of people – indeed, I would be surprised to find anyone who hadn’t experienced some sort of negative impact from the changes that Covid-19 has worked upon our lives. I’m sure, here in the UK, we’ve all heard from friends and relatives finding themselves homeschooling their kids with very little notice and usually equally sparse support. I expect more than a few of my readers have been in that position themselves, not just heard about it at one remove. People who have lost their job or had hours cut have obvious stress. People who thrive on social contact will have struggled with the limited ability to see other people. People who have had to restrict contact even more because of being at high risk, such as the UK’s ‘shielding’ category, will have had extra stress just getting essentials, and those who already relied on shopping deliveries have had to cope with slots being much harder to come by.

Those are the obvious sources of stress, of things that can affect people’s mental health. And those are just the tip of the iceberg.