THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PRESENT

So, the Ghost of Christmas present arrived yesterday.

My daughter tested positive for Covid.

She was one of the careful ones.  Triple-vaxed. Face-masked.  Chairwoman of the Board when it came to monitoring and enforcing the family's compliance with Covid protocols.  Last Christmas, she orchestrated a testing and quarantine schedule that had her, her now-fiance and her brother arriving for Thanksgiving and then camping out for the entire month of December.  

She wouldn't allow Covid to kill Christmas.

And for the most part it didn't.

The California relatives could not travel east for the festivities.  But there was a big Zoom session on Christmas morning with everyone as the stockings were emptied and the presents opened.   My 91 year-old mother arrived from New Jersey along with my sister, and all was safe at our Covid free Christmas.

Thanks to Courtney.

This year was supposed to be different.  

We are all fully vaccinated.  

In fact, almost all of us -- and certainly Courtney --  had the  booster shot as well.  

We even  thought we had skirted tragedy earlier in the week.  

My niece, recently returned from a trip with her college friends to Nashville, had to check in to a nearby hotel for two days after learning that one of her travel mates had tested positive.  It was all hands were on deck as we awaited the results of her PCR test, which came back negative on Wednesday evening.

It looked like the virus was camping out elsewhere.

But, alas, it wasn't.

And to make matters worse, it turns out that we are not all that atypical.  

My son informed us earlier in the week that one of his co-workers had been exposed and that he would therefore take a test (it came back negative today). Our best friends told us this morning that they had to cancel their plans for a 10-person Christmas Day feast because their visiting son-in-law just tested positive.  And my colleague at work was set to welcome his son, daughter-in-law and seven-month-old grandson from Los Angeles but they cancelled their trip as Omicron invaded New York.

A big part of the problem here is . . .

Capitalism.

It turns out that capitalism is really good at invention but not particularly good at distribution.  

The government incentivized the creation of vaccines at what amounted to warp speed, and the private sector, especially Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, generated them.  The key thereafter was getting shots into arms across the world.  The original Covid virus mutated and variants emerged.  All of them, however, were seeded in the wake of effective vaccines by the existence of an unvaccinated population.  

Had everyone been vaccinated, neither Delta nor Omicron would have had their way.

But everyone wasn't.

So they have.

It's weird.

My family was all ready to combat Covid to celebrate Christmas last year.  

But vaxed to the max, it got us this year.

Screw it.

Merry Christmas anyway!

Given our ignorance . . . or obstinance . . . 

We can't beat Covid.

But God can.

And He arrives tomorrow.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL

It's Christmas and I have been thinking about songs.

About Christmas carols to be precise.

Everyone thinks Christmas carols  were written long ago.  

And for most that is true. 

"Silent Night", for example, is a German carol -- Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht -- and was composed in 1818. "O Come All Ye Faithful" -- Adestes Fidelis -- was first sung in 1743.  And "Angels We Have Heard on High" -- an English carol -- was created in1862. In fact, Wikipedia lists carols from thirty-two countries or cultures going back to the 12th century. The overwhelming majority of those songs were created well before the 20th century.

Another interesting fact is that the songs composed in  the 20th century have a decidedly secular cast.

 More Rudolph than religion.

"Silver Bells" was written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans in 1950.  The "Christmas Song" -- Nat King Cole's "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire" -- was created in 1945 by Robert Wells and Mel Torme.  And Rudolph's glory as the "Red Nosed Reindeer" first saw the light of day (or night as it were) in 1947.

Secular or saintly, however, the songs unite.  

Every year around this time they come on and almost everyone chimes in with at least a bar or two, sometimes even the whole song. During the pre-Covid Christmas season in 2019, a crowd of morning commuters in a New York City subway station belted out Mariah Carey's 1994 hit, "All I Want for Christmas Is You".  Or, as Shileligh Law put it in  "Christmas in New York", their tribute to the victims of 9/11, "There's somebody singing a holiday song/You pick up the tune and start singin' along/You learned the words some time way back when/It's Christmas in New York again".

Sometimes the songs channel the Jesuits.

They challenge us to find God in the everyday.

To find the saintly in our very own secular.

Shileligh Law's 9/11 tribute was one:

          It's Christmas Eve, 11 pm

          You walk down to the church and you quietly go in

          You kneel down in the last pew right on the aisle

          And say "God I know that it's been awhile

          But can you do me a favor on this Christmas Eve

          Can you send out some blessings to people for me

          You know these last few months have been kinda tough

          And we could use a little love"

          So bless New York's finest, our angels in blue

          Giving us hope and helping us through

          And bless New York's bravest, the FDNY

          Giving their sweat and their tears and their lives

           And bless all the medics and our troops overseas

           Bless the guys in the hardhats, removing debris

           Bless the everyday people who answered the call

           Bless those who gave some and those who gave all

           Bless all the souls who left us this year

           You may be gone but you'll always be here

           Singing and dancing with family and friends

            It's Christmas in New York Again.

Another was "Do You Hear What I Hear", Regney and Shayne's plea for peace in 1962 in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis:

            Said the king to the people everywhere

            Listen to what I say! Listen to what I say!

            Pray for Peace, people, everywhere

            Listen to what I say! Listen to what I say!

            The Child, the Child sleeping in the night

            He will bring us goodness and light

            He will bring us goodness and light

The King's plea, however, was not a product of his own wisdom.   It came from one of the Bible's unwashed -- "Said the shepherd boy to the mighty King/Do you know what I know?"

I was in a restaurant last week in mid-town Manhattan attending a small dinner party my son's company was throwing in his honor.  Mid-way through the event, a half-dozen fellow diners at another table started singing "The Twelve Days of Christmas".   By the time they got to the "five gold rings", pretty much the whole restaurant -- along with the wait staff -- was joining in. 

My son this month is finishing up his second masters degree. 

This one in business administration. The first was in public administration.  

Most people choose one or the other.  He is unique.  In a world where ideologues mount their tribal parapets proclaiming the inherent superiority of one or the other sector, public or private, he has studied both and thus made himself an expert on the idiocy of all manner of present-day extremists.

He has always been like this.

In high school in a toney suburb, he and a friend decided to live in a treehouse for most of their senior year.  In college, he and that same friend traipsed over a good chunk of South America, bribing their way in and out of Bolivia. On a family vacation in Mexico, he announced he was not returning with us but would instead take an overnight bus to Guatemala to visit his girlfriend. When he told my wife that he thought "Dad was not happy about this", she explained that "Dad's unhappiness" might have something to do with reports of active volcanoes and civil unrest along his chosen route.

None of these were full on marches to "see how the other half lives".

But he definitely knew his own circumstances were not typical.

And wanted to explore the differences.

After graduating from Colorado College, he ran a family farm in upate New York . . .

With no in-door plumbing.  

While there, he resisted the political correctness of his little corner of liberal academia by hooking up with the Marines and applying to get into Officers Candidate School (OCS).  Most of his college professor friends, and not a few fellow students, raised their eyebrows.  

But he went to Quantico anyway. 

And crashed out after two weeks.

At the end, a drill-sergeant type asked him what he intended to do to "grow up".  He said he didn't know but that, right then and there, he wanted to  "speak Spanish".  

The officer thought he was nuts.

He wasn't.

He just didn't like being yelled at constantly.

I asked him how he had managed to spend a couple of years working to get into OCS if "yelling" -- their love of which the Marines do not keep secret-- was a problem.  He told me he had intentionally avoided looking at that portion of the promotional video.  

So he left OCS and got a job . . .

Speaking Spanish.

It was more than that, of course.  He represented day laborers in their efforts to get work -- and get paid for it -- in northern Westchester County. Then it was on to the South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation, a non-profit that for almost fifty years has been helping to bring businesses and jobs to that impoverished precinct. And most recently, as a senior officer at the National Development Council's Grow America Fund, he has been financing -- preserving really --  small businesses in America's northeastern rural rust belt.  

In all three, he has married the conscience of a public sector idealist with the pragmatism of a private sector businessman.  

To the notice of those in both.

Last year, during the height of Covid, Delaware's Sen. Chris Coons praised him for personally calling scores of his clients in that state, many of whom were getting the run around from the big banks, to walk them through the process and paperwork needed to get the Paycheck Protection Money that kept them in business.  And one Mom and Pop hardware business even produced its own video singing his praises for getting them the  financing larger banks would not provide.

Those are real differences . . .

For real people.

So NDC threw him a party.

Ostensibly for getting his MBA.

But really just for being . . .

Conor.

It's Christmas in New York again.