Is There a Safe Way to Be Home for the Holidays?

Is There a Safe Way to Be Home for the Holidays?

One of American culture’s most cherished traditions is for a mix of young and old people from different households to sit close together and share food in a poorly ventilated space without masks on for an extended period of time. It’s called Thanksgiving.


This year, the holiday season is laced with danger. Individually, Americans have been tempted over and over during the pandemic to violate public-health experts’ recommendations, whether by the celebration of a family milestone or just a drink at a bar. But the holiday season represents a different, more collective sort of temptation that’s likely stronger than any of the ones that came before it.


[Read: The winter will be worse]


The dangers of the holidays will keep some people from traveling home. Xochitl Segura, a 30-year-old in San Francisco who works for a marijuana dispensary, most likely won’t be at her parents’ house, in Napa Valley, for Thanksgiving or Christmas, because her mom is worried about the health risks. This has been hard for her to accept. “My parents are getting older, and I think about how they’re not going to be around forever,” Segura told me. “Who knows how many more Christmases we’re going to get, how many more Thanksgivings we’re going to get.”


These are the powerful and entirely valid feelings that public-health guidance will run up against when Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and Christmas arrive. Many people will, unlike Segura, act on those feelings, and it could be dangerous when they do so during the same roughly monthlong s ..

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