Well we've sorted out Xmas - going to my mum's then they offered to have the kids into the new year so I can clear the backlog of uni assignments before the next term of trudging through online shit that barely works starts. They're a childcare bubble with us - although one we only call on during half term holidays!
They don't even need to make Christmas sound grim now - they've sewn the seeds and the internet arseholes are doing it for them splendidly - all the "I can't understand how anyone possibly thinks Christmas is worth all the danger" tinsel shaming going on everywhere else. In the real world no one I know of is fully following the rules anymore - and closing non essential retail the month before December has just made the local Tesco so rammed full you couldn't get a parking space today - everyone who would have gone elsewhere for trees, decorations etc has had limited options so trotted off to the supermarkets - so that's helped a lot hasn't it?! Likewise - the reduced festive travel period and the student travel window - that means that our course have had to condense some face-to-face events down in time and increase the numbers on campus, and there are going to be more people at motorway service stations etc... so it just seems so fucking counter productive. They were seriously thinking we would give each other a lump of coal and stay at home?!
People NEED interaction - they NEED those social connections - people marvel at the periodic table, but for me I think one of the most beautiful things in the world (when I'm not swearing at having to learn it) is the IPA chart of all the sounds in human languages around the world - it's like the essence of what makes us human, fitted onto an A4 sheet of paper - we have the need to connect and communicate and physically touch our loved ones - and people now are really really suffering - we've turned our universities into prisons, our schools into freezing cold fortresses of misery, our care homes into cell blocks and it's just horrific. People have been blocked from all those support networks that get you through a shitty day - the cup of coffee with a friend, or even the smile from a little old lady in the supermarket at your toddler who is acting up that calms them down... and this is going to go on for over a year. It's absolutely horrific to put people through this - and they're begging for more more more?! I can't compute it anymore.
I was having a discussion with my placement supervisors the other day - and the mental health toll is really really really beginning to bite. I'm working with learning disabilities - and the service users having rules changed and being allowed to do things, then not allowed, and having their day centres and things they go to for their routine open and closed and open and closed is just making lives of people who function very well normally so so much harder.