There will be a lot of empty chairs at Christmas dinners

• Published date: 19 December 2020
• Author: Jennifer O'Connell
• Date: 19 December 2020
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

In truth, not everybody is having fun this year. We're not all waiting for the family to arrive. Dublin Airport passenger numbers will be down 88 per cent over the holidays. Between Monday and January 4th, 127,000 people will fly in and out. Last year, it was 1.2 million. About 13,000 pass- engers will go through Cork Airport; slightly over one-tenth of last year's traffic.

Many more who live in Ireland won't travel to see family in other counties, because they're worried about the pathogens that might be lurking in their nasal passages, ready to pounce and cause a mild sniffle, a catastrophic cytokine storm, or something in between. They're heeding the warning by Prof Martin Cormican that, if they've been living it up this weekend and they go to see older relatives, they're "putting their lives at risk".

It all adds up to a lot of empty chairs at Christmas dinner tables this year. A lot of graves that won't be visited, a lot of grannies who won't be eaten out of house and home.

In place of all those furloughed traditions, we'll be forging new, more fretful ones. We're buying more lights and more Christmas trees, as though we can keep the darkness at bay with flashing LED bulbs and dancing Santas in gold velvet.

If this is your first Christmas abroad, the other new traditions you can look forward to - and I speak with the weary knowledge of an ex-emigrant here - include juggling time zones to try to organise a mutually compatible Skype slot, discreetly coaxing the grandchildren to perform for the camera. A lot of telling yourself that it's only a day. A few episodes of slipping into the bathroom for a quiet, shuddery sob.

The infantilising and, as it turns out, far too optimistic messaging from public health officials was that if people "managed to keep up the very high standards of behaviour for the full six weeks", they would get to reward themselves with a "normal Christmas" or a "meaningful Christmas". Many of us did our best, but the ghost town out in Santry and the R number creeping up to 1.3 this week shows it hasn't really worked out like that. This can still be a meaningful Christmas, but it won't be a normal one.

Given the grief experienced by so many this year, the faces and hands pressed against nursing home windows, the "Back Soon" signs, the terrorised women who crept to the bathroom in the middle of the night to message Women's Aid, the children who fell through the cracks when schools were closed, the livelihoods that evaporated, fretting...