Might as Well Plan Now

Recently we found out our company won’t be calling anyone back on site until there is wide availability of a COVID-19 vaccine. Today, I read in the news some speculation that that wouldn’t happen until summer or fall of 2021. Looks like we’re buckling in for the long haul.

I bring this up because guess what, all the fall and winter holidays will pop up on the calendar regardless of what is happening in the world. We might as well plan now for alternative ways to celebrate.

I used to visit my family three or four times a year. We live a thousand miles apart so it takes some planning. I haven’t seen any of them in person since December, and it’s looking like we may not even be halfway through yet. Believe me, I’d love to be making plans to see everyone during Thanksgiving.

Which is what I’m doing. I’m emotionally planning to see them on a video chat.

I know a lot of other people are planning to meet in person. Or if not, they will have extremely intense family pressure to meet, which will ramp up in double proportion to any resistance from the more science-minded or cautious voices.

DO IT I REALLY WANT YOU TO

Look, I got COVID at a social occasion. I’m pretty sure the person I got it from, got it at the airport. That is my bias.

I’ve heard some pretty compelling talk about “love over fear” and people making choices based on how they interpret that. I feel the same exact way.

The way I interpret it, I choose love. Any sacrifice that is demanded of me, I’ll make it gladly, because I love my family. I will do anything to keep them safe. That means depriving myself of their physical presence for a while.

I choose this sacrifice of physical presence over fear:

The fear I know I would feel if my parents got sick

The fear I would feel if I realized I was the one spreading the virus to people I love

The fear I would feel, standing in the hospital parking lot, holding a big sign over my head

I don’t need to love someone from inside the same room. That would seem to me to be a very low-battery kind of love. A weak love.

Mine is a love that radiates across continents. I have no fear that it can’t be felt.

I know this because if anything, I hear from my family more often than I did before. They really pulled together for me when I was sick. We’re on family group chat every day, cracking jokes and sharing pictures. Of course we’d rather be able to see each other in person.

Which we will. One fine day.

Just not this Thanksgiving.

This is why I say we might as well plan now. There’s time to make it fun, if we’re all united in agreement that we’ll do things virtually.

For the rest of you poor souls whose families are going to try to guilt-trip you into risking their lives by carrying your body to them, there’s time to plan your responses.

Keep in mind, we might all be wrong. There’s always time for people to change. But you can probably write out a pretty accurate script of what each of your family members will say in most discussions. You can probably predict all the ways they’re going to try to “force” you to do what you don’t want to do, which is to go to their house, hug everyone with no masks on, and potentially have to plan a virtual funeral two weeks later.

A good friend of mine taught me how to do this. I told her I needed to learn to say no. She said, “Don’t say no. Say, “Um, no.” We practiced it together until I got the intonation right.

There are a few ways you can go about this. What you choose depends on individual temperament.

Passive-aggressive: Say yes and then claim that someone is too sick at the very last minute.

Workaholic: Say maybe and then claim you have to work on a report (school or work).

Tech-savvy: Make a recording of yourself saying No and play it on a loop so you don’t have to rely on willpower.

Executive: Pay someone to handle the guilt calls for you.

Honest: Say you have no intention of traveling during a pandemic and you aren’t going to do it.

This is what I’ve learned from being married to an Upholder. They just say what they intended to say. They don’t do guilt - they either do what they committed to do, or they do nothing, because if it isn’t part of their system, it kinda doesn’t exist. One simply does the correct thing, and in this case it is obeying shelter-in-place orders and working together to end the pandemic.

This is what I’ve learned as a Questioner. My answer to every possible situation is, Here, read this. Then I turn on the firehose and send mass quantities of links, articles, books, charts, and pre-review journal articles. I can genuinely do this ad infinitum. Wear ‘em out. Of course, there is the other variety of Questioner who gets sucked into the information vortex and does not necessarily have the academic rigor to distinguish fact from conspiracy theory.

I don’t think Rebels need any help giving people a firm No. Rebels don’t react well to peer pressure.

It’s Obligers who have the issue. There is a distinct Obliger tendency to operate by group consensus. If the Obligers in the family all got together and came up with a beautiful fantasy of eating and drinking in large groups, then by gosh you’d better not mess it up.

This is where I think planning can come in. What if we simply came up with a variety of plans that are more interesting and fun but still allow everyone to live until next year?

These are some of the things my family has done:

Try to copy a picture blindfolded, on a timer, and then give points for individual parts of the drawing. This could be fun to do with gluing tail feathers on the turkey.

Two partners try to wrap a gift and tie a bow around it using only one hand each. Also on a timer. Extremely funny on video.

Wear matching ugly sweaters.

Trade stories and jokes.

Trade recipes.

Simply put a laptop on the dinner table and casually hang out.

One thing we have not done, which would be great fun, is to learn a TikTok dance and have a family dance-off.

We also haven’t done any photo slideshows, although we probably should.

I tend to be the family tech support person, which is why this occurs to me, but some family members may be resistant to doing stuff remotely because they don’t realize the possibilities. They may be very uncomfortable using most of the features of the electronics that they already own. Sometimes they’ll try something for a cute grandchild or niece that they wouldn’t try for one of their own adult children.

There’s still time to practice.

One day, all of this will be over. I sincerely hope that on that day, all of us can celebrate together. I plan to run down the middle of the street yelling WAHOO! Might as well plan for it now. It will help to have something to offer as a distraction when you have the inevitable talk with your family about why this year is going to continue to be a little different.