A decade of family, food and festivities
My family has gone to San Francisco to visit my wife’s family every holiday season for a decade.
Our trip isn’t just about seeing family. It’s about carrying on traditions. I love what we do every year when we’re there -- you could set your watch to it. For example:
- We host a Hanukkah party and pack dozens of people into the house and I’m the latke maker (picture pounds of potatoes and onions fried in oil). I stand by the pan for an hour frying away. It may take three days of showers to get the smell off my skin, but it’s worth it (even my wife who has to deal with the fried potato odor emanating from me agrees).
- Every year we get an order of crabs, freshly caught that day, and serve it with a pool of butter. Everyone makes fun of me because I spend 30 minutes cracking the shells and pulling out the meat before I take a taste. But once I have a heaping pile of meat, I eat until my blood begins to coagulate from all the butter.
- Christmas Eve is the same every year -- dim sum in downtown San Francisco.
- Christmas Day is always the same -- a trip to the movie theater and then dinner at The Old Clam House, one of San Francisco’s oldest eateries.
- We always drive by “that house” to see the incredible lights display (every city has one). This one has toy trains carrying gifts, huge presents hung from trees and a giant teddy bear.
- My daughter loves the ocean, so we always take a trip to the beach to see sea stars and anemones and then head down the coast to meet one of our oldest friends and her boys at the Monterey Bay Sea Aquarium.
But it’s not just the big things I’ll miss. Every year, we get a free calendar from the local grocery store featuring photos of the neighborhood, which we hang in our kitchen year-round. I’ll miss catching up with loved ones as we trudge, out of breath, up and down hills and through beautiful gardens -- a welcome break from a Colorado winter.
Canceling this trip and missing out on all these amazing traditions, people and food sucks. There’s no other way to say it.
I’ve had plenty of moments where I figured out how we could make it work. We’re cautious people, I think, who have mostly stayed at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. We could drive out to San Francisco with limited stops and only eat food we pack. I tell myself, with masks and hand sanitizer, we could probably get there without catching the coronavirus.
But that’s not how COVID works. When it’s racing uncontrolled through Colorado or California or any of the states in between, I can’t guarantee I can keep my family safe. And that’s assuming we don’t already have it and wind up spreading it to another family.
One scary part of this pandemic is the different ways COVID-19 impacts people. Some people in the same family have mild symptoms while others end up in the ICU.
It’s also scary that some people have COVID-19 but don’t have symptoms. In fact, anywhere between 40 to 50 percent of people who catch the virus are asymptomatic and could unknowingly spread the virus to lots of people.
Given how much we’re seeing community spread right now, every stop on our road trip is risky. It’s not worth endangering my family or endangering someone else’s.
