It’s a Thanksgiving unlike any other. We can honor the holiday—and our health—by thinking creatively.

It’s a Thanksgiving unlike any other. We can honor the holiday—and our health—by thinking creatively. 

Good afternoon.

Marielle Argueza here, with less than a week to go until Thanksgiving, reflecting on two images that have been circulating in my mind lately. One of them was a future family dinner in the open air at my sister’s house, my family tucking into a Thanksgiving feast. If it happened to be raining, the image was slightly altered to take place in her garage, the door wide open. It was something I was looking forward to and planning on for around a month.

But in recent weeks, another image started seeping into my thoughts: a bright red blanket over the United States. What is this picture? Oh yeah—the Covid-19 map showing a surge in cases.

As the days crept closer to Thanksgiving, my family and I had a difficult conversation and made the painful decision to not see each other in-person for the holiday. We all agreed it would be too risky, because small, multi-household gatherings are a part of the reason cases are surging.

Even before the surge, though, I suggested we all get tested and quarantine ourselves. I tried hard to piece together that picture. I could make an appointment for testing, but results would take up to six days. One sister doesn’t have the option of quarantining due to her job, meaning a negative test result could be compromised anyway. Our sister and brother-in-law, the medical professionals in the family, have had to at least work part-time in hospitals.

2020 is again testing my patience, and probably yours. The happy image of a sort of normal Thanksgiving slipped away. But I’m writing now to tell you that I’m OK with it, and we should all learn to be OK with it. If we zoom out and see the bigger picture, the big swath of a red map, it will only become worse if we force our ideas of traditional turkey dinners and normalcy during a pandemic that makes no exceptions regarding who it harms.

So I propose another image. I’m not sure what it’ll look like quite yet, but it’s starting to take shape. At the moment, it looks like everyone thinking bigger than friends and family we miss, and thinking about the health and safety of others. It looks like accepting that the quicker we reopen now, the more we risk slowing down a recovery. It looks like reassessing the reasoning behind our traditions, and finding creative ways to adapt them so we can still have a happy holiday.

So for me and mine, that’s going to look like a virtual Thanksgiving, cooking roughly the same menu and convening over Zoom. It’s going to look like FaceTime conversations with loved ones, and dropping off a plate of food to a few people I know who are working on Thanksgiving Day. It’s a rough plan, but it’s one I can accept.

-Marielle Argueza, staff writer, marielle@mcweekly.com