As Omicron dashes Christmas plans again, here’s how we can still give meaning to the festive season

Covid-19 has upended travel plans and traditions, added to fears and reminded us of how, after so many health crises, we are still failing to protect the vulnerable
This Christmas, make looking to how we can help those in need, volunteering and donating to charities a tradition

Alice Wu

Published: 1:30pm, 5 Dec 2021

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OMG Omicron. Covid-19 has done it again: upending plans carefully crafted around travel restrictions and quarantine hotel bookings. The season of Advent has barely begun and Omicron has borders closing one by one, giving us another “Covid non-Christmas” to look forward to.

The simple tradition of having our young and small family take a photo with Santa at the mall has fallen through once again. And yes, a virtual Santa misses the point. Every mother’s child cannot “spy to see if reindeer really knows how to fly” when Santa’s not on his way; he’s not here – he’s only creepily superimposed onto a photo.

At least in Hong Kong, we’ve still got our chestnuts roasting on the open fire – those chestnut stalls have been popping up now temperatures have dipped.

And that’s the thing. These traditions and rituals anchor us in the here and now, keep us connected to the past and comfort us with the simple certainty that there are things we can count on next year and the year after that. They are signposts, like the real-universe version of “marking” ourselves safe. The stability and predictability of coming together to do something simple but important gives us a connection to one another and to time.

06:14

Why is the Omicron variant so concerning? Virologist warns Covid strain could ‘wreak havoc’ in HK

Covid-19 has upended those simple but important moments and disrupted the making of special memories. A dentist interviewed by this paper about how he felt over Omicron obliterating holiday plans said it is a feeling of “not anger – [but] a kind of sense of rejection. I was looking forward very much to going back home.”

From Beta to Gamma, Delta to Omicron, Covid-19 has robbed many of moments to look forward to. That is the ultimate rejection – to be denied a chance to take part in giving life meaning, and to say that these months of sacrifice would cumulate into something significant.

We look around and there is still plenty to add to our list of unsettling fears – like the train wreck trek that US-China relations is on. And as for how far humanity has come on the global pandemic fighting side …. Well, there has been breathtaking advances in science, but it still can’t beat the evolution of viruses.

Even worse are world leaders’ responses. The World Health Organization called on nations to not act rashly over border closures, yet travel restrictions went up in no time. We can’t seem to shed our need to target groups of people for the spread of viruses. We can’t stop using ostracism as our response to communicable diseases.

02:30

Asia tightens borders as spread of new coronavirus variant Omicron clouds region’s return to travel

If we think about it, each large health crisis has been a “wake up” call, but we are not “woke” at all, are we? From the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) to the Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), from bird flu to Ebola, we have made progress but have not yet been able to protect the vulnerable.

And yet people would rather be fixated on why, in naming the Covid-19 variants, the WHO skipped the Nu and Xi letters in the Greek alphabets. It’s supposed to be all Greek to us – that’s the point. That people are reading into it justifies the decision to skip it in the first place.

We can still give meaning to this season of goodwill, and so let’s reclaim it head-on. Better yet, make that our new tradition, of marking this moment as important: on the feast of St Nicolas (which is today, by the way), pay tribute to the Santa Claus by taking on his legendary habit of gift-giving. Make looking to how we can help those in need, volunteering and donating to charities (Operation Santa Claus) a tradition for this season.

UCLA professor of social psychology Naomi Eisenberger conducted studies on Covid-19 related loneliness and the ways people went about reducing the pain of isolation, and she found that doing something for someone else reduces people’s feelings of loneliness, but doing something for yourself doesn’t. That’s something to take note of.

Alice Wu is a political consultant and a former associate director of the Asia Pacific Media Network at UCLA