Suzanne Harrington: My Christmas will be less about spending, and more about connecting 

Normally, the what are you doing for Christmas question starts bubbling up just after Halloween. Who is going where, who is doing what with whom, who is on the never-again list, and how much it’s all going to cost  — financially, emotionally, environmentally.

Like the friend who feels obliged to visit her family every Christmas in Auckland, spends all year paying it off, and is greeted with a shrug. Or the couple whose respective relatives start pressuring them around July about who gets to be with the grandchildren on Christmas morning — they ended up in couples therapy because of it. 

And that’s before you ever consider the swathe of the population for whom Christmas is not so much a Marks & Spencers advert as a Samaritans one — the lonely, the bereaved, the estranged, the newly split up, the unhappy, the homeless.

This being 2020, it’s a different kind of nightmare before Christmas, a wholly unexpected one, full of questions with unknown answers. My kids and I live half an hour from Gatwick, but so far trying to figure out how to get to see our family in Ireland is like trying to arrange teleportation from outer space.

Do we book flights? Will there be flights? Do airports even exist anymore? Can we get tests before we head off, so that we don’t accidentally kill anyone? Do the tests actually work? Do we really want cotton buds shoved so far up our noses they swab our brains? 

Could we get there by boat and car instead, thereby avoiding being crammed inside a metal container full of asymptomatic plague carriers? Is Wales still closed? Are there still ferries? Would we have to quarantine ourselves for two weeks before, two weeks after, or both? 

How to get teenagers to do that, so they don’t inadvertently finish anyone off? 

Is it worth the risk just to exchange prettily wrapped socks and push Brussels sprouts around a plate? The short answer would seem to be no. The longer, epidemiological answer would also seem to be no. But the reality for so many of us with older rellies is that every day counts. Christmases are not infinite. 

Personally, I don’t give a monkey’s about Christmas itself, other than to loathe how it’s been rebranded by marketing departments as our Primary Gifting Period  — ugh  — but I give many, many monkeys about not being able to see my family, some of whom are not so much spring chickens as autumn owls. Which I realise is a lot of wildlife metaphor in one sentence, but you get my point.

The libertarian argument is how very dare any government tell us whether we can or cannot see our loved ones; the virus doesn’t care about what we think. 

Can we do Zoom Christmas, our screens decked with holly? Maybe 2020’s Covid Christmas will serve to reset our attitudes to the whole thing, and make it less about spending and more about connecting — even if those connections keep freezing mid-sentence.