Friday 25th December 2020, Long Jetty, NSW. 5:19am

who knows what might happen?

It’s raining. I closed the van door and took my beach towel off the line. People will be coming later but if the ABC weather guy is right, all will be well.

We used to talk about the weather, now it’s about climate.

We used to talk about holidays, now we talk about a virus.

We used to wonder about what we could do for the world, now we wonder what the world will do to us.

Christmas is still a time of giving, or is it?

I’ll walk down to the service station later and get some ice for the esky. Remember when nothing, except hotel dining rooms for bona fide travellers, was open on Christmas Day? Remember bona fide travellers?

I have family and friends in the upper Northern beaches lockdown zone. They won’t be coming to my place as planned. We are planning now for a January Christmas, that is if Linda can get back from Queensland after Jetstar cancelled all flights from Dec 26 to Jan 8. The Avalon cluster has crossed the border from NSW into Qld, so who knows what might happen?

We used to plan for the future. Now we take it as it comes. We never stop learning, hopefully.

Some of us have had an absolutely terrible 2020. Some of us have barely noticed a difference. The notion we are all in this together has been proven to be a bona fide lie.

The spirit of Christmas, the spirit of giving, is the spirit of humanity. It doesn’t matter what day of the year, it matters every day.

December

It’s a Christian thing. Morphed and assimilated, personalised and commercialised. Seasonally appreciated, proportional to your latitude north or south. Food, a focus. Family, a necessity. Gifts, optional. Giving, the whole point.

And as we near the end of a year which has marked us all in one way and a thousand, good and bad, predictable and crazily unbelievable, we dream of what can be in 2021. Lest we forget.