Thanksgiving is going to be pretty weird this year. Just know that you’re not alone.
If there has ever been a year in which Nicole Peterson has felt a stronger desire to be at the Thanksgiving table with her mother than this one, she can’t remember it.
Being apart for this particular occasion is not normally that big a deal for Peterson, truth be told. Normally, she and her parents spend Christmas together but not Thanksgiving. This year is different, though: This year marks the first Thanksgiving the family will observe since Nicole’s father died of lung cancer in April, and Nicole had been determined for months to try to find a way to get to Memphis — or get her 69-year-old mom from Memphis to Charlotte — for the holiday.
Unfortunately, COVID-19 had other plans.
“We hoped to be able to get together ... knowing that we’d had so much time apart in this really difficult year already,” Nicole Peterson says. “But I talked to her last night and we just knew that wasn’t the right decision. We want to take precautions. We want to make sure everybody’s safe.
“So all of us have just decided that we’re just going to not do anything.”
With that, Peterson — who now plans to celebrate quietly with her husband and his mother (their next-door neighbor) — joins the millions of Americans heeding health officials’ warnings to stifle the temptation to have a “normal” holiday amid surging infection rates around the country.
And it’s admittedly a pretty significant temptation. For a couple of different reasons.
The first is that, well, obviously, it’s Thanksgiving, and for many people the whole point of Thanksgiving is to get together with as large a gathering of friends and family as possible and share a special meal and give thanks, as well as longstanding traditions that range from turkey trot running events to backyard football games to Black Friday shopping excursions.
Secondly, on top of that, virus fatigue is real, which explains why dining at indoor restaurants continues to be popular, even though it’s riskier than eating outdoors, and why traffic seems to be so darn bad again.
We all hoped it would have been over by now. We all thought, Can’t we just have one thing be normal this year?
‘Different choices for different reasons’
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s answer to that question has been simple when it comes to Thanksgiving: No.
No in equal measure to both large indoor gatherings and out-of-state travel.
After all, many health experts have seen spikes after Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day and Halloween, and there’s thought that the fallout from Thanksgiving could be even worse.
It’s not entirely clear how many people will be on the roads and in the skies this week. Originally, AAA said it was expecting up to 50 million people to travel for Thanksgiving (compared with 55 million last year). But the organization this month revised that estimate by saying “the actual number of holiday travelers will be even lower” — without giving an actual number.
That’s in large part because coronavirus cases are approaching 200,000 per day in the U.S., with hospitalizations at record levels and the death toll at its highest daily level since May.
Meanwhile, on its Thanksgiving recommendations page, the CDC practically begs people not to travel, setting an extremely high bar for the justification of most types of plans and starting two consecutive sections of advice with the same sentence: “Celebrating virtually or with the people you live with is the safest choice this Thanksgiving.”
Of course, there are plenty of families out there for which it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. There’s some middle ground, many feel, between carving a turkey for 15 people who’ve traveled in from five different states and sitting at a kitchen table by yourself eating takeout with a side of Zoom.
Jennifer Jones, for instance, is planning to drive with her husband, Greg, from Charlotte to Litchfield Beach in South Carolina, where they’ll spend the holiday in a rental house with their 30-year-old daughter, Kelsey, and her fiance, Noah, who live in Charleston.
“We haven’t been as perfect as we can be, nor have we been as careless as we could have been,” Jones says. “All in all, we’ve done the best we know how, with what we can and cannot control — and we understand people make different choices for different reasons.”
In their case, by the way, the choice was still to dramatically scale things back.
In a normal year, Thanksgiving for the Joneses means running the Charlotte Turkey Trot with their two adult children in the morning, followed by tailgating with friends in the SouthPark Mall parking lot. Then it means dinner with 14 family members at the table, and on Friday it means a steady flow of their kids’ childhood friends in and out of the living room for the Joneses’ famous turkey-chili open house.
This year, though, it means none of that.
“It’s such a bummer,” she says. “Like, I hate to even cry in my turkey gravy about it because I know other people are dealing with way bigger issues. But it feels like this year has been so many little losses.”
“And we’re rolling into a time where — whether you love it or hate it — the holidays kind of seem to bring your family together and —” she pauses, before continuing, “It’s just all so bizarre. It’s kind of otherworldly.”
The ways Thanksgiving will be unusual
Will anything not be weird on Thursday?
It seems unlikely.
For starters, in some cases, people might literally be asked to show a negative test result at the door, with the thinking being that it will give everyone at the table peace of mind — although health experts say it shouldn’t, necessarily. (According to the CDC, a negative test result “only means that you did not have COVID-19 at the time of testing.”)
Among other things that will be different:
▪ If you live in the SouthPark area and see more runners than usual out, even though you know for a fact that the Charlotte Turkey Trot isn’t taking place this year in the traditional sense (it’s gone virtual, meaning runners can do it in and around their own neighborhoods), that’s because runners have posted on social media to say they plan to go run the route anyway that morning because “it’s tradition.”
▪ Turn on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and you’ll see a made-for-television production filmed in New York City over two days with just a quarter of the typical number of participants (all wearing masks and practicing social distancing) and zero spectators. Meanwhile, Charlotte’s Thanksgiving Day parade won’t happen at all this year; from 4-5 p.m., WBTV Channel 3 will simply air a collection of “best-of” segments from previous years.
▪ Turn on the Detroit Lions’ NFL game against the Houston Texans at 12:30 p.m. and you’ll see no fans in the stands at Ford Field because the state of Michigan is in a fresh shutdown until December due to a spike in new coronavirus cases.
▪ Major retailers like Best Buy and Walmart have decided to keep stores closed on Thanksgiving — for the first time since they decided it was a good idea to keep them open on Thanksgiving — in an effort to slow the spread. (They’ll still be open on the day traditionally known as Black Friday, but many retailers have offered Black Friday-ish sales all month and therefore the traditional stampedes seem less likely.)
▪ And this year, family members can have the same old time-honored arguments about politics over coffee and pumpkin pie, with a virtual twist: If someone wants to put an end to it, that can be accomplished with the simple tap on the mute button.
But for the most part, we won’t need to step outside or even turn on the television Thursday to be reminded of how weird the pandemic will have made our Thanksgivings. We’ll just have to look around the room.
In Linda and Murrey Atkins’ case, when they look around the dining room inside their home at The Cypress of Charlotte, a senior community in south Charlotte, they’ll be constantly aware of what’s missing.
“I would love to see my seven great-grandchildren,” says Linda Atkins, 83, “but ... there was no other choice and it’s just the way it is. I mean, Murrey’s son and their children are going to the beach, and they asked us to come down there, but they have three girls and one’s been in college and one’s been in Charleston and we just didn’t want to take the chance, I guess.
“We just thought it was the thing to do just to stay right here,” she says, “and be thankful in our own condo.”
