A Covid Christmas in Italy

I stand at my stone kitchen sink overlooking the olive grove and oak and chestnut forest tucked deep in the ravine and see colored lights twinkling in the early winter dusk. 

I lean closer and raise a sudsy hand to adjust my glasses for a better look. I see them clearly now. Christmas lights. Hung in haphazard Charlie Brown-fashion across my distant neighbor’s terrace.  

Then I sigh.

It is less then one week before Christmas and we, like our neighbors, are doing our best to get into the Christmas spirit at our new home in the Umbrian countryside.  

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Our tree stands proud – brightly shining in a corner of our new living room. A fire glows under a bough-covered mantle in our new fireplace. Red velvet bows trail down our new wrought iron staircase. Yet as I move from room to room and admire the festive beauty, I feel a new sensation grab at my heart. Sadness. I’m no stranger to a down day but for a Christmas lover like me, it’s unheard of for me to feel this emotion during the holidays.

But so it is.

A sadness that sneaks up when I allow myself to think too much about what is happening in our neighborhood, our town, our country and the world at large.

This is our first Covid Christmas and we are all struggling in one way or another to come to grips with the horrors around us and yet find a way to celebrate Christmas.  It is new for all of us.

Who could have imagined as we sat down for Christmas dinner last year that we may never again know the freedoms we shared then? To greet each other Christmas morning with a kiss and a hug; to squeeze together on the sofa as we open gifts; to stand arm-in-arm as we toast each other to a new year about to be born.

Who could have imagined? Yet here we are.

Christmas is coming and we must find a way to celebrate with the constant threat of the virus hovering over us.

We must find a way to feel the joy of the season.

Not home for the holidays

Are you where you want to be this Christmas? For thousands of people around the globe, the answer is ‘no’. As I write this, flights have been banned in and out of the UK due to a new variant of the virus that is wreaking havoc on already shattered nerves.

Australia has a cap on flight arrivals. An ever-increasing number of countries are imposing stricter national lockdowns and mandatory quarantines.

The message is clear. Stay where you are. The classic holiday song, “I’ll Be home for Christmas” does not apply this year.  We’ve been ordered to comply with a new version, “I’ll Stay Home for Christmas”.

For us, that means hunkering down for the holidays in our new home in Umbria. Just the two of us along with our furry-family; our 8 month old puppy ‘twins’, otherwise known as Tocai and Luna and Chunky Charlie, our rotund feline.

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For my writer-friend Cheryl, it means spending Christmas in her adopted Canadian city of Toronto – a world away from her 93-year old Mother who is ill in a care home several continents away. Try as she might, Cheryl can’t get a flight home.

And here in our small medieval village, it means a dozen or so expats won’t be packing their suitcases for their much anticipated annual Christmas trip ‘home’.

Yet we are finding a way to face the holidays together even as many of us are alone.

The power of community

Stories abound around the globe of how communities are coming together in this Covid crisis to help one another. Not just to lend a hand to make sure friends and neighbors have the basic necessities but to seek ways to bring some normalcy to our lives in a time of such upheaval – to find creative ways to continue to celebrate those special moments in our lives.

Hats-off to a clever parent who set up a curbside birthday party for her five year-old daughter.  The FB photos of the birthday girl, surrounded by party balloons, standing at the end of her driveway as car after car pulled up and a little friend would jump out, parcel in hand to wish her a happy birthday warmed my heart.  She literally jumped with joy.

 A nod to my friend MD who refused to let the ban on choirs gathering squash her love of singing. She joined a growing number of virtual choirs popping up online and let her voice soar amongst like-minded singers around the world.

And a bow to those families who are finding a way to be together while remaining apart this holiday season – by setting up Zoom family gatherings on Christmas Day or bundling up to share a socially-distanced back yard drink and wish each other well.  

Covid won’t beat us. It can’t kill our holiday spirit. We are bigger than this virus. Stronger than our setbacks. More powerful than our fears.

Christmas is coming and we will celebrate. We will be present even if we can’t exchange presents.  We will find the joy in this magical season.

Making new traditions

This year offers us the perfect opportunity to look at our Christmas traditions and give some thought to what we might want to do differently, now that we can. We can make changes in how we want to spend the day without guilt. We can give ourselves permission to admit that maybe some of the traditions passed on to us don’t work anymore. Don’t bring us the peace and joy we wish from the holiday season.

So change it. Evolve, grow, adapt, reinvent. Get creative with change. Change can be painful but it almost always brings about something new, fresh and rewarding that can a blessing.

Use this Covid Christmas to think about change in your life. To rest and rejuvenate the mind, body and soul in preparation for a new year that we all hope will be better than the last.

Here in our medieval village, we were faced with a tough decision. Do we cancel our annual wreath making workshop, a tradition that is my favorite event of the year or do we go ahead with some changes to respect restrictions?

For the past five years, the wreath or ghirlande workshop has grown from a small group of mainly stranieri (foreigners) to include a growing number of Italian women who gather in the Comune basement to sing a mix of Italian and English Christmas Carols and create works of art out of olive branches and greens collected from local forests.

For a week in late November, we gather every afternoon. Working at long tables fragrant with cuttings of still wet cypress, laurel and fir. We toil away exchanging stories and the occasional stretches of silence as we concentrate on our masterpieces.

And then at the end of each day we count the growing tally. Until we reach 100 and we are ready to gather and hang them on the streets of our beloved Paciano.

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But this year, we could not gather. We could not stand side-by-side and sing together and hug each other hello. But we also could not let go of this tradition. This year more than ever, our village needed some Christmas cheer. So we put the word out to villagers near and far to collect the wreath forms and any decorations they wanted from the community stash and make some ghirlande at home for the town piazza.

We set a date in early December to hang the wreaths expecting to have maybe a dozen. We were wrong. It seems nothing can kill our community spirit. Row upon row of stunning wreaths lined the piazza the morning we showed up to hang them. It was a far cry from 100 but enough to lift our spirits.

Paciano had been transformed once again into a Christmas wonderland.

I know Christmas won’t be the same this year. It know it will be different. For all of us. This Christmas, why not give yourself the gift of Peace – peace of mind to know you are where you need to be this year.

The gift of Acceptance that this is but one year; one Christmas of many in our lives to come. So while it may be different from all the Christmases that have come before, it is no less special. No less divine and magical.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
From now on
Our troubles will be out of sight

May this be true. May our troubles be long out of sight as we bid farewell to 2020 – the year the world changed. The year we changed.

Merry Christmas. Buon Natale.

Until we meet again…

Anna