COVID can't dampen holiday joy

To decorate or not to decorate?

That is the question.

My apologies to Hamlet and Shakespeare lovers everywhere.

But it is, indeed, a question.

COVID-19 has turned our world upside down in 2020, making some of the most heartfelt moments — getting together with family — some of the year’s most dangerous.

The whole question of family gatherings is now fraught with concerns about unintentionally passing coronavirus along to a grandparent or other relative who might be particularly vulnerable.

As grandparents who are well within the high risk group, we’ve taken our own precautions.

Thanksgiving was a dinner set for two.

There was FaceTime in the morning and a Zoom gathering in the afternoon, but it was essentially just the two of us in the house alone.

And now Christmas is on the horizon, and all of the usual traditions are a little bit out of kilter.

Do we decorate the house for the holiday? Or not?

Normally (you do remember normal, don’t you?), we’d be hauling stuff down from the attic for the occasion.

There would be lighted garlands on the stairway to the second floor. There would be lighted displays near the fireplace. Snow globes — nearly a dozen of them — would show up all over the place.

Special holiday pillows would replace their everyday equivalents on the sofa. An M&M dispenser that we acquired years ago at an Arts Place auction would appear.

A spring watercolor by Connie’s mother that hangs in our kitchen would disappear to be replaced by a Ruthven print of chickadees in winter that our friend Andy sent us a few years back.

Outside, we’d be stringing lights through the burning bush hedge at our doorstep and up as far as I can reach in the river birch tree in the backyard.

Inevitably, there would be debates and a certain amount of squabbling about extension cords. We always seem to misplace the most important pieces of the puzzle.

But that’s a normal year, and 2020 decided long ago not to be normal.

So the Christmas Hamlet dilemma persists. Do we or don’t we?

Here’s our best answer: We do and we don’t.

We do put up our outside lights. Those lights are not only a tradition, they’re also a way of letting our neighbors know we are celebrating the season. Besides, there are no recorded cases of anyone contracting COVID-19 while on a ladder stringing outside Christmas lights.

And inside?

We’ll do whatever the spirit of the season moves us to do.

Probably not the lighted garland on the staircase. But who knows? Maybe that too.

Our Christmas tree, by the way, is already in the house.

It’s an enormous Norfolk Island pine I bought as a small potted plant from the Flower Nook more than a decade ago.

Today, it’s taller than I am.

Some lights are already arrayed around its branches, but my guess is there will be more in the next several days.

And if there’s no one to see those lights but the two of us, that’s OK.

The season’s joy will not be diminished one little bit.