Staying Safe for Covid Christmas Means Tough Choices, Feelings of Loss and Planning for 2021

Profession: IT entrepreneur

Have you experienced any silver linings? Mr. La Rosa says the pandemic has given him a chance to show his love for his parents by taking care of them, for instance by doing their grocery shopping. “My parents are very autonomous, they do everything for themselves and for me,” he says. “So to do this for them for a change has been a positive thing for me, a gift.”

For Simon La Rosa, even more than for most Italians, Christmas is traditionally an intense time of celebrating with family. The period between Dec. 21 and 26 includes the birthdays of both his parents and their wedding anniversary. That ordinarily means a total of five gatherings, with as many as 50 people in attendance, packed into six days.

These include a Christmas Eve dinner at Mr. La Rosa’s parents’ house, featuring a feast of seafood dishes such as stewed eel and grilled prawns, recalling his maternal grandparents’ experience as proprietors of a seaside restaurant near Rome.

The birthday of Mr. La Rosa’s father Manuel, who will be 77 this year, is usually an even livelier occasion, stretching from lunch to well past dinnertime. Mr. La Rosa, who as a boy sang in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel Choir, comes from a highly musical family and says his father’s birthday party is a “continuous jam session,” with the repertoire ranging from jazz and Latin American bolero to chamber music.

This year, the festivities will necessarily be muted. Mr. La Rosa and his two brothers, who also live in Rome, plan to visit his parents to mark their 52 years of marriage. But the big dinners have been called off.

Another Christmas tradition, midnight Mass, will be impossible because of the 10 p.m. curfew currently imposed by the Italian government. Mass will take place in most cases at 8 p.m. Mr. La Rosa fears that many of Rome’s churches, with their capacity reduced because of social distancing rules, will have to turn away worshipers.

He and his wife—and their three sons—will join his sister-in-law and her family for a Christmas lunch at the apartment of his 83-year-old mother-in-law, a gathering small enough to allow for social distancing, which they also practice on their visits to his parents.

“We’ll spend less time with them and we’ll stay a little farther away but we’ll try to communicate the same affection as ever, because they need it and so do we,” says his wife, Rita Cavallo.

The curtailed celebrations are a source of acute sorrow for Mr. La Rosa.

“We feel like we’re missing out because, as you get older, you realize how few opportunities are left to see each other,” he says. —Francis X. Rocca

Smaller Gatherings and Lots of Outdoor Time Help North Carolina Family

Lawyer juggles canceled flights and last-minute decisions while watching the Covid cases mount

Katherine Asaro, 48, Chapel Hill, N.C.

Profession:Lawyer

How are you celebrating? “We’ll get together with friends outside, socially-distanced, masked. The Christmas gift exchange with my family this year is going to be on my back porch outside. People who are not comfortable, they are going to Zoom in,” Ms. Asaro says.

What are you missing the most? “I am missing hugs. I’m a big hugger and there are just no hugs at all. I’m missing seeing a friend for lunch, the spontaneous gatherings that aren’t happening,” she says.

Katherine Asaro usually spends Christmas celebrating with her husband Andrew’s large extended Italian-American family in Macomb Township, Mich., outside of Detroit. Every year, about 50 people gather for a Christmas Eve dinner of ham, homemade pasta and cannolis from Vito’s bakery in nearby Clinton Township. Christmas Day, there’s another big family feast, this one featuring Mr. Asaro’s mother’s lasagna. “She really does make the best lasagna,” says Ms. Asaro.

This year, the couple and their 16-year-old daughter, Sawyer, had plane tickets to Michigan booked for later this month, for a scaled-down celebration with only Mr. Asaro’s mother and sisters. But the family canceled those plans. They also canceled the trip to Miami they had booked for right after Christmas. “The uptick in numbers [of Covid cases] was making everyone nervous. It feels irresponsible for us to travel right now.” Ms. Asaro says.

The holiday season caps off an especially busy work year for Ms. Asaro, who graduated law school at age 40 after a career as a high-school history teacher and working for the family’s consulting business. She is the director of the Disaster Legal Services Program at the North Carolina Pro Bono Resource Center, a program that organizes free legal services for people affected by disasters. The program usually works with hurricane victims, but has expanded to also help those affected by Covid. Now, Ms. Asaro manages an initiative that gives free legal advice on issues related to Covid to North Carolina small businesses and nonprofit organizations. There have been questions on everything from loans and benefits to liability, employment and bankruptcy issues, she says. “I feel really fortunate that I have a job where I get to go in each day and feel a little bit that I’m contributing.”

The Asaros’ 20-year-old son, Jackson, who is away at college in Oxford, England, won’t be coming home for the holidays because of U.K. quarantine restrictions. This will also be the family’s first holiday season without Ms. Asaro’s father, Josef Blass. A math professor, business entrepreneur and bridge champion who was born in a Soviet labor camp near the end of World War II, Mr. Blass died of liver cancer in October. The family hasn’t yet had a funeral service. —Andrea Petersen

Nashville Couple Tweaks Christmas Calendar to Keep Family Safe

Postponing one event and moving another online ensures there’s adequate time for quarantine; Cooking and eating together via Zoom

Lorena Infante Lara, 29, Nashville

Profession: University science writer

How do you feel about the holidays this year? “On a personal level, I think I’m OK. It’s going to be better for us to spend time with [family] safely in the future than it would be to risk all of our lives and spend time with them right now. On more of a broader view, it really frustrates me because I know that it’s possible to bring the pandemic under control and that we’re all just not doing everything that we all can do,” Dr. Infante Lara says.

What tips would you give on making the most out of not being together with loved ones? “Zoom chat with folks and try to cook the same thing. I imagine it’s going to make a feeling of togetherness feel a bit more pronounced.”

Lorena Infante Lara, a 29-year-old science writer at Vanderbilt University who has a Ph.D. in biochemistry, lives in Nashville with her partner, Jamie McCormick. She says they both value the holiday time gathering with family more than marking Dec. 25 as a specific religious holiday. This year, that gives them flexibility to postpone Christmas by adjusting the timing of one visit and moving another online, juggling quarantine protocols and prioritizing safety. Happily, all sides of the family are on board with a bit of creativity and sacrifice.

“For us, it’s a time to be with family,” she says. “Just a time to be thankful for what you have and let each other know how much you care.”

Ms. McCormick’s mother and sister will travel from Georgia to Nashville in January and will wait to stuff stockings and exchange gifts. The one-month postponement gives them time to ensure they can isolate for two weeks. Ms. McCormick’s mother’s chemotherapy treatment had precluded her from safely quarantining in time for Christmas.

“We want to do a strict, two-week quarantine, not going out and getting groceries, even though that’s relatively low risk, not going out at all,” Dr. Infante Lara says. “Not going to doctor’s appointments or stores or anything like that stuff for two weeks to make sure that everybody is not actually infected before we see each other.”

Dr. Infante Lara’s side of the family, meanwhile, traditionally gather at Christmastime in Mexico City. That trip has been canceled and instead, the couple will hold a Zoom video call with Dr. Infante Lara’s parents, aunt and grandmothers on Christmas Eve, per their Mexican tradition.

“This will be the first Christmas that I don’t spend with my family.” She said both families took the decisions, made in October, in stride. “My family took it well because they understand,” she says. “They didn’t actually ask me to go at all, they expected that I wouldn’t go just to be safe.”

She’ll miss her aunt’s signature dried and salted codfish dish, known as bacalao, and is considering trying to prepare it herself. “Ideally we would like to coordinate what meals we make on Christmas Eve so that we have a similar meal with the people we’re going to be Zoom talking with,” she says. “I’ve never bought codfish so I don’t know, we’ll have to see.” —Ray A. Smith