What are you doing for the holidays?

Sleeping in, making a chicken and video-calling family.

I am supposed to perform like I do every year with my folk dancing group for Chanukah. The performance will be outside. I found out two days ago the practices are inside, so I told the teacher I doubt I will go to practice sine they are inside, and she said it was fine to skip all of the practices and still perform, so I might.

Avoiding everyone. We were freaked out about 30,000 new covid cases a day in April in the USA, now it’s 100K+.

The difficult part is my mom in assisted living. They will be locked down. Keeping contact with packages and phone is so distant.

Staying home with wife and grand kiddos, eating here like always. Ditto Christmas. Eating outside is possible, after all, this is Central Texas. As the old saying goes, of you don’t like our weather, hang around a few days. It’ll change.

So far no takers except my mom. In laws will allow us on the patio for coffee. Still not good here.

Staying home with wife for US Thanksgiving (Smoking a whole Duck) !

Christmas and New Years still at home.

There is no Thanksgiving here. I’ll just sit here and watch you American jellies enjoy your holiday :)

Mimi Is Tet the next big holiday? Does Vietnam notice January 1st?

@Jay yes, we have Tet. But it won’t be before three months, according to Chinese calendar. We celebrate January 1st too but it’s nothing compared to Tet, as it only lasts one day.

We’re invited to visit friends (friends that are like family). That is probably what we’ll do but I would be equally happy staying home and cooking something and just hanging out and relaxing.

My sister is staying with her boyfriend in Florida. My stepfather we’ll be seeing later on that weekend.

Christmas, I don’t know. Again, I’d be very happy just hanging out at home, relaxing.

I’ve been more relaxed lately with more free time, due to less hours in the office and therefore less running around. I look forward to more of that. I remember previous holiday seasons, so hectic with having to work, shop, and just being tired from everything. This year, a happy reprieve as long as we don’t get sick.

Everything is so messed up I don’t even know. I want to host 1 more time in this house but there isn’t room. (Since the last time I’ve hosted, in 2012, we’ve added 4 more grandkids.)

Last year my DIL and son hosted it. She wouldn’t let me bring any dishes.
She comes out of a background of food services at a retirement home and that’s what all the food tasted like…institutional food meant to serve hundreds. The stuff I’ve traditionally cooked from scratch she’d just opened a bag or a can or a box and added water.
My homemade stuffing, which came from Robin’s sister from before the kids were born, was rejected. She just used the boxed stove top.
Rick has always made killer gravy from scratch but he couldn’t bring it. She just opened a few packages of powdered gravy mix.
I couldn’t even bring my famous bread. She used frozen dough.
It was pretty depressing as far as the food goes.

I’ll be at home crying.

No @anniereborn! Why??

Thanksgiving is not actually a thing over here. We’ve invited friends in the past, but this year it’ll just be my husband and me. We’ll be going for an autumn hike with the dog. After that, I think the plan is video games and pie, possibly a fire in the backyard.

For Christmas, I don’t have plans yet. Certainly not going to be attending the big family gathering. If the cases go down drastically, restrictions might be lifted. In that case (and weather permitting), I might invite a couple family members to come visit a zoo we like. Outdoors and masked, with pretty tight restrictions on how many people can enter.

It wouldn’t be Christmas, but it would at least be fun. I’m thinking we might do an “Australian Christmas” in the summer, when sitting around outside is possible again. BBQ and presents sounds pretty good.

My family decided to not get together this year. Makes me sad.
@anniereborn are you okay?

I haven’t seen any of my family since February. My sister is planning on having her usual Christmas dinner, but….both my husband and I are high risk. So we won’t be going.

@anniereborn I’m so sorry. That’s exactly why I hate the argument that we just need to “protect high-risk groups” (aka “isolate them”) while otherwise pretending we’re fine. It’s such a self-centered argument.

Since my divorce, I’ve been going down to celebrate Thanksgiving with my DC area cousins. That won’t happen this year. I’ll be having a small dinner with some neighbors who live 4 houses down. We are in a pod together and one other couple is coming too.

For Christmas, I have invited the same neighbors for afternoon tea but otherwise don’t expect to do much other than some phone calls with my kids.

Thanksgiving in Canada was celebrated Oct 12 2020.

Enjoy whatever and however one can but with safety in mind, in order to be able to celebrate it in the next few years too.
We should all be Thankful that we are alive and well…for now.

The recommendation that I’m familiar with is to gather only as a household or to do so outdoors and not share food or utensils. 25 is an absurdly large group.

We’ll be staying home with just the household as we’ve done since March. I wish I had a pod, but (a) I don’t trust people to really understand what quarantine and social distancing mean, (2) my adult son who lives at home works at Amazon, so he has some potential exposure, (3) we are a multi-generational household and (4) you could consider four of us to be high-risk because of pre-existing conditions/age.

@Cupcake Everyone I know who believes covid is real is saying the 25 number is crazy big and makes no sense to us.

For many people 25 is not a crazy number for the holidays. That includes my Mom’s side of the family and Rick’s side.
At Rick’s annul family reunion there can be 65 people easy.

@Dutchess_III It’s a crazy number for a pandemic Thanksgiving is the point.

@JLeslie Do you have a citation for that? I can’t believe the experts are saying up to 25 is ok.

@JLeslie: I haven’t seen anything saying 25 is ok.

Great question. I don’t remember who said it, but I heard it on TV. I’ll search.

We probably had 50 plus people at my grand daughters wedding recently. But we were at a rodeo arena so there was plenty of spacing, and we sat one seat apart. During the vow exchange part that is. I thought it worked pretty well.

This article near the end says Massachusetts is reducing the guideline from 25 to 10, so I guess maybe I heard about a particular state recommending 25, but I really thought it was someone speaking for the country.

@jca2…it looks like that decision is made at the state / County level. So you’d have to check with them.
Here are the CDC’s guidelines.

I saw the CDC when I was searching. How can anyone not know what to do by now? It baffles me. I understand why states put out those recommendations, because people really need to be told what to do in specifics. The people who think it is overblown, some will follow some rules if they are given rules. Practically the whole country has cases rising. For now my little corner is about 7 cases a day, but they often happen in little outbreaks we have noticed. 6 people who went to a yard sale where a woman selling items was sick, 7 people who play cards and most of them were at the Trump rally together, and so on. I just found out someone has covid who goes to one of the indoor line dancing classes here, hopefully no one else got sick, waiting to hear. Most people don’t wear masks in the class.

@JLeslie…never mind. You’d have to have been following the conversation

I agree, a 25 guest roster during this time is insane (although I went to a wedding in June where 50+ were there) Rick and I turned down an invitation to a birthday party for one of my sons by another mother and father, who I haven’t seen in 4 years. All of his family, who is from OK, was going to be there. It was like…. “Well. Hell. No. Damn it.”

@Dutchess_III I think a lot of people break their own rules here an there. The problem I see, which you obviously do too, is with the holidays a lot of people are going to be breaking rules all at once and cases are high. It will be like what happened Memorial Day in Florida, Kaboom, cases ramped up after that. Maybe all over the country they ramped up, I don’t remember.

No clue what you’re talking about @JLeslie.

She’s saying a lot of people who normally are safe and behave in a safe manner will depart from that and take part in large gatherings for the holidays, @Dutchess_III. This is going to make the numbers go up, like they did after Memorial Day in Florida, and perhaps all over the country.