Finding Christmas Spirit in 2020 locked 9000 miles away from family
By: Dr Prital Patel
Tags: Christmas, Science, Thank You, Public Health, Front Line Worker

A letter of thanks to science & my global human family.

For the past two years, November and December were my months to crank up John Legend’s, A Legendary Christmas album on repeat. Hearing those songs meant in just a couple of days, the 9000 mile distance from Australia to my family in the Americas would be non-existent.

So many beautiful memories are attached to his album playing in the background in December. 2019, dancing in my sister’s living room in Florida singing along with my 2 year old nephew. 2018, showing off to my Canadian parents the beauty of a warm Aussie Christmas, at the heart of the Great Barrier Reef. Listening to his album on the flight back home from Queensland to Sydney, gobsmacked at the aerial views of the Opera house and the harbor bridge.

Aerial view of the Harbor Bridge and Opera House, Christmas 2018

2020. Sigh. Days away from Christmas and I have yet to find the strength to play John Legend’s Christmas album. As a permanent resident of Australia, despite being a Canadian citizen, I cannot leave to see my family. Our borders have been shut since March. On several occasions tears have welled up when I hear Christmas music in stores. As a scientist and someone working in public health I know so well that the pain I feel is a necessary pain. I profusely thank our health departments for this pain because border lockdowns are a key reason why my fellow Australians have largely escaped the wrath of this pandemic. With this in mind, every day, I continue to muster up the strength to be okay because the alternative is more lives lost. That I am not ok with. That I will never be ok with.

Then there’s the question of what Christmas in 2020 really means in the middle of a pandemic and without family. I’m caught between two impossible worlds- one that says that I should party my heart out in my one bedroom apartment by myself and celebrate being alive. Celebrate things like the incredible success of the community-led efforts that have protected Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities from the worst of the 2020 epidemic [1][2]. And yet, as I obsessively refresh my twitter feed and catch up with the latest world news, I’m filled with incredible guilt at the thought of celebrating Christmas when I know that chairs belonging to essential workers at the dinner table will be empty this holiday- either temporarily or worse permanently. Chairs belonging to people who did nothing but show up to work the front lines so that I could stay home and be safe.

It’s been difficult to reconcile this. How do I celebrate? Can I celebrate? Should I celebrate? Perhaps, the best thing I can do is pause, at home, keep everyone safe, and postpone Christmas until everyone has a chance to get vaccinated. Perhaps this December should be about appreciating the sacrifices my extended global human family has made so that the world can keep turning. Perhaps, Christmas will just arrive later than usually, and instead, it really should be a 2020 Thanksmas.

So I take down the Christmas ornaments and instead make cut outs of the grocery worker who stocked our shelves, the teachers who kept educating our children, the environmental services staff that disinfected hospital rooms and common areas and made sure that infections did not spread, the respiratory therapists, the personal support workers, the nurses, and the doctors who risked their lives every single day and worked their bones to exhaustion and woke up the next day and did it again and again and again. The scientists and epidemiologists who dropped their primary research projects and gave their heart and soul into understanding COVID-19. The science communicators who spent every waking hour crafting easy to understand messaging so that the public were well informed. The families of essential workers who put their hand on their hearts scared to death while their loved ones left home to do the essential work we needed to keep us going. The medical laboratory staff that worked night and day under immense pressure to provide us with our COVID-19 test results and the contact tracers who followed up diligently with cases and contacts. The citizens of the world who listened to public health advice and gave up so much this year. The basic scientists and graduate students who burned the midnight oil for decades in a sometimes thankless job and kept searching for answers the world had no idea would be so incredibly pivotal in ending this pandemic. The participants of the vaccine trials who signed their names on so we could get the answers we so desperately needed.

Slowly, I watched my Christmas tree transform into a Thanksmas tree, where the topper is not a star. It’s a piece of paper with the words “An unstable intermediate carrying information from genes to ribosomes for protein synthesis”. It’s the title of the article that a group of scientists sent out to the world in the 60’s talking about the discovery of mRNA- the basis of todays two approved vaccines against COVID-19 [3].

So it is decided, this year I will embrace the Thanksmas spirit instead. And maybe, just maybe in July 2021 when majority of our home towns and vulnerable are vaccinated, I’ll be on a flight home to celebrate a Legendary Christmas.

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Sources:

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31545-2/fulltext?hss_channel=tw-27013292

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-14/indigenous-community-covid-response-blueprint-self-determination/12882080

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/190576a0

Dedicated to all the essential workers whose lives were lost to COVID-19, all the front line workers who continue to do the work that keeps our world turning, and to Fawad, the hardest working respiratory therapist I know. You make me so proud every single day. I cannot wait to see you again.