This year has highlighted the value of our key workers, of our volunteers and of our communities’ abilities to pull together.
It has also shown the importance of individual responsibility, for us all to do the right thing, even if that that ‘thing’ meant staying at home.
Tier 4 means this will not be a normal Christmas for any of us – be we stuck at home alone or with just our immediate family around us, without the normal visitors to our homes and not visiting others. Doing the right thing this Christmas will be the antithesis of what Christmas means to many people. Staying at home.
Perhaps the best thing about this Christmas is that it will bring many of us one day closer to receiving the vaccine and all of us one day closer to a more normal life. A life where we can once again meet family, meet old friends, make new friends and laugh and hug and mix without the fear of the awful, invisible illness and death in the air.
In the meantime, as Churchill said, the best thing to do if you are going through hell is to keep going.
Let’s all hang on to the vision of what life will be like towards the summer. Christmas will be hard.
The rest of the winter may be harder still. But it will get better. The days are already getting longer. Just keep going.
