Christmas Traditions in the Time of the COVID

It seems like most Christmases I am either recovering from a cold, feeling like I’m about to catch a cold, or in media res.

My daughter and I used to have a tradition of reserving one day together before Christmas for us to go shopping, have lunch, and see a movie.  (Always a movie like “Dude, Where’s My Car?”)  One year I remember we were arguing about the temperature in the car as we drove to the mall. I was wearing a jacket zipped to the throat and kept turning the heat up. She was wearing short sleeves and kept turning the AC up. (California.)

“Would you stop doing that please?” I asked her. “I’m freezing!”

“Are you getting sick again, Dad?” she asked.

The rest of that holiday week I don’t remember clearly except that I didn’t go to many group events and never felt a twinge of remorse about possibly infecting scores of Christmas mall shoppers and restaurant diners and movie goers with my cold.

Last year I was blissfully healthy at Christmas, but on account of the whole COVID thing, I couldn’t go anywhere anyway, so I just stayed home and watched Christmas movies and joined family and friends on video chats on FaceTime or Messenger or Zoom depending on the preference of the call initiator. 

A realization slowly came to me: “I haven’t had a cold in almost a year.” I had had two colds earlier in 2020, one in January and one in February, when it had been going around the office ever since a co-worker returned to the office with a wicked cold after 3 weeks visiting family in the Philippines back in November. I usually don’t get colds in back-to-back months like that, so I went to my doctor for the second instance, which featured a deep lung cough that wouldn’t go away.  He asked me if I had been around anyone who had been to China or if I had been to China myself. It was apparent that he was working from a script, which was the first time I’ve ever seen him do that in 30 years.  I thought something must be up.  I said, “No,” because the Philippines is not China. He let me go with a warning and a prescription for Tessalon.

Soon after that, we all started wearing masks and washing our hands and maintaining social distance, getting up early to get to the store during senior shopping hours to see if they had any Lysol or Charmin yet, standing in line outside Trader Joe’s while they limited the number of people inside, and disinfecting the groceries before we brought them into the house. The result of all those precautions was, besides doing my part for the greater good to help flatten the pandemic curve, I didn’t catch a cold the rest of the year, and I hadn’t caught one this year either.

Then in mid-December my roommate got sick, and although we took many additional precautions, I could feel on the 22nd that I might not be able to make it to my sister’s for the family gathering on Christmas Eve. In addition, my roommate had announced Tuesday morning that she was unable to smell the spequlaas she had mixed for use in the Dutch-style cookies she hadn’t had the energy to bake yet, and that’s a COVID symptom, right?

Although we are both vaxxed and boosted, I drove to CVS, Rite Aid, and Walgreens trying to find an at-home COVID test. All three of their websites said they had them in stock at the local outlet, but no luck. Ashley at Walgreens told me she had heard from a friend that all the drugstores in town had run out of at-home tests, and nobody knew if they would be getting more tomorrow, but I should come down at 7AM anyways to be the first in line.

I was not about to stand in line to shop at Walgreens, only to be disappointed like that time out in front of Best Buy in Framingham during First-Year-Move-in Weekend back in ‘02. 

We made an Appointment.

Wednesday noon we drove to Escondido and parked outside a nondescript building that Google Maps had trouble pinpointing, in a combination residential/small industrial neighborhood.  We checked-in by phone and notified the attendants that we were waiting in a Gray Honda Civic to their right of the door to the parking lot. Soon a young lady wearing blue hospital scrubs, with a smart phone in her back pocket and carrying a clipboard and a handful of sealable plastic bags with sticks protruding from the zip ends, came out the door and walked to the Gray Honda CRV parked on our right, to her left of the building door. The driver rolled down his window and began chatting with the attendant. Four of them in the CRV were here for COVID tests, at $100 a pop.

It turned out that there were a bunch of people in the parking lot waiting in cars for COVID tests at $100 a pop, which was somehow reassuring since they were all clearly being careful about upcoming family gatherings but also troubling because of the economic implications.

Another young lady in blue scrubs with a card swipe machine in place of the smart phone in her back pocket had emerged from the building, and together the two of them made a clockwise-from-the-top circle of the parked cars, swabbing and swiping as they went.

The facility had run out of test kits earlier that morning, but they had more coming about an hour from now, the first one said at each car, the ETA never getting closer. They were offering the people who had arrived for their appointments the opportunity to get swabbed now and receive the results via email later this afternoon. She finally got to our car door half an hour after our appointment time, swabbed roommate, swiped her credit card, and we were off to Trader Joe’s for vitamins, ice cream, and wine.

That afternoon the test results came back negative, which is a good thing, right? So yay! Nevertheless, I could feel my own symptoms worsening, so I called my sister and let her know that, out of an abundance of caution and concern for the elderly, like her and Mom, and for the wains, like her grandchildren, we would not be joining them for Christmas Eve.

Later that evening, I decided that I needed to go to the store to pick up DayQuil, Kleenex, and maybe a bottle of bourbon and some lemons to get me through the weekend. 5 minute drive, 10 minutes to find the Kleenex in Albertsons (it’s not with the other paper products), and 15 minutes waiting in the checkout line while the lady I let go in front of me tried every card in her wallet until she finally found one that worked, 5 minute drive home, and I was exhausted. My timing was perfect!

The rest of the weekend is a blur of tissues, tea, and toddies, DayQuil and the NFL, leftover Navy bean soup, and the occasional bourbon and lemon. Once I think there was bacon. I vaguely remember some video chats, too. Roommate was on the recovery slope of her illness progression, so she prepped some food for me too – oatmeal, colcannon (roommate calls it boerenkool, the Dutch name for it), quesadillas, slices of fruitcake and pannetone – and we watched football and Christmas movies and “Don’t Look Up.”

I could only sit back on the couch for a couple hours at a time before my breathing became labored, and then I would have to go sit in my work chair where I could sit up straight. I couldn’t lie in bed more than two hours either and had trouble falling asleep and staying asleep. 8 hours of sleep occurred in 2-hour increments spread across maybe 12 hours and 4 locations for 4 days.

The coughing is the worst. My diaphragm hurts. My throat hurts. When the first cough comes on after a period of respite, the concussion of the forced release of air resonates from my shoulders to my heels. My head hurts and my toes hurt. The brain keeps the cough going even after it hurts to cough until the lungs give up whatever mucus is currently making me wheeze.  And I don’t have my Tessalon with me. We kept a box of Kleenex on the couch between us, and whoever got up to refresh drinks first had to dispose of the used Kleenex, then wash their hands. Even our aging ginger cat sneezing on my lap used up some of the Kleenex box, although she never helped keep the area clean.

But I know how my body reacts to a cold. I can feel it when it’s coming on, and then I know how long it’s going to last, and that gives me hope. Sure enough, by Sunday noon I knew I had only a couple more days of gradually decreasing misery ahead of me, if I forced myself to rest. I took a nap. Sunday night I slept through the night in bed for the first time in 4 nights. I woke up Monday morning wondering how I could change my approved vacation day today to a sick day, or if I even wanted to bother.

Because we had both been ill, we hadn’t done a great deal of grocery shopping in over a week. The healthy whole grain sandwich bread and the everything bagels had both grown fresh mold, so we threw them away. But for the first time in days, I prepared my own breakfast! – a toasted generic brand English muffin with unsalted butter and a cup of Trader Joe’s Dark Roast.

I felt so emboldened by the simple success of breakfast that later, I decided to make a sandwich for lunch. Since we had no sandwich bread, it would have to be ham and Swiss on a flour tortilla. Not bad actually. I’ve had it before. You can either grill it in a pan like a ham and Swiss quesadilla, or roll it and fry it like a ham and Swiss flauta, or just microwave it and eat it all gooey like.

As I sat down with my phone to eat gooey, I received an alert that my daughter had posted a new Tweet. I opened Twitter to see what was on her mind. Something about car sickness. Not wanting to discuss her family’s health in a public forum, I texted her privately to see who was carsick. It was all I could do to keep gooey fingerprints off the screen as we texted while I was eating my gooey ham and Swiss.

Daughter is apparently coming down with something, too, all the way across the country. It was she who got carsick today. She had decided when they got home to read about the body’s reaction to illness, and she texted me a link to an article that said the body produces enough mucus (approx. 34 ounces) every day to fill a Big Gulp cup, with a little left over for a refill. More if you’re sick. The article also discussed “pulmonary toileting.” I had to look it up as I took another bite of my goo.

“Pulmonary Toileting” is where most of that 34 ounces of mucus goes, the ounces that you don’t capture in the Kleenex or spit out.

I didn’t need to do any more of my own research into mucus.  I should have gone with the flauta. Crispy.

“I am finished with my lunch now,” I texted back.