Brown Christmas

Title for this post is kind of forced. In 2019 the title was "Blue Christmas" because a bunch of sad stuff had just happened, and in 2020 it was "Grey Christmas" because Ontario was using a colour-based system for its COVID measures, and we were just entering Grey, which meant lockdown. So this one is just for the weather. We almost had a white Christmas, but had a flash thaw overnight that left everything brown on Christmas morning.

Realistically it would be another Grey Christmas. You probably know already, but there's a new COVID variant called Omicron which is thought likely be much more transmissible than any of the others, although it's looking like it likely is a little less deadly. Italics used to emphasize we don't know things concretely yet.

Apparently there are now 12 variants. I literally haven't heard of any of them since Delta. I guess if a strain doesn't prove to break a record of transmissibility, it doesn't get the press it used to. I remember hearing about Omicron and thinking that sounded like it didn't come right after Delta in the Greek Alphabet. I looked it up, and yeah, it's the 15th. More than halfway through, I wonder what our naming scheme will be once we use up all the letters.

Although they skipped a few because it was bad branding, like "Nu", since it would have people calling it the "new variant" which is confusing, and "Xi" since it would sound like it was named after President Xi of China. It would be funny to adopt this naming scheme to replace using country names, especially since it started off with people calling it the "China Virus" or "Wuhan Flu" only to use the new system to call a strain after the president of China.

It certainly feels more ominous than last year, since in 2020 we knew a lockdown was on the horizon, but the government buckled to societal pressure and postponed it to Boxing Day. This year they called it before Christmas, which feels like they really had no option.

Technically, it's not an official lockdown. We don't have phases, colours, or steps which were the systems put in place to tell us where we stood. But safety measures are increasing and society is reacting. My job's gone remote again.

I was surprised, to be honest. Not long ago I said that if another pandemic happened right now, or a much more deadly variant, that I didn't think society would be as proactive as it was during the first wave. The hope would be that we would know how to handle it because of all the knowledge and experience we've acquired over the past couple of years, but in reality, I thought that everyone had become so burnt out and mistrustful of the government, that an attempt to lock us down again would be met with record breaking noncompliance. 

I guess that's why they haven't installed a system or officially called it a lockdown, but instead just rapidly integrated new safety measures. Society isn't happy about it, but we're not broken either.

We were going to have a Christmas gathering at our place. My mother, brother, aunt and cousin were going to visit, which would have been within the current limit of 10 people allowed per indoor gathering, but my family is more on the cautious side and everybody cancelled.

I won't lie, I received an invitation to join Lee-Anne's family and I accepted. I felt bad because everyone in my immediate family chose to not take that risk, but if I stayed home I would be the only one spending Christmas alone, so either way I'd be isolated in my circumstance.