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Christmas traditions and rituals have forcibly changed in the year of the pandemic
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In a city of masses, contact and speed become voids, spaces and pauses
Every year around Christmas, Gerardo Romo goes to Chelsea Market to go to a kind of fair. On Wednesday, Christmas Eve, “there was no nothing, solo darkness, the wolf’s mouth”.
A Chilean New Yorker for 20 years who has spent months during this pandemic portraying empty streets with his camera, Romo has also encountered closed food outlets in Grand Central, where the traditional flea market It has been done virtual. And he did not expect to be impregnated with a feeling of sadness seeing everything so “slow and bleak”, But he understands. He even thinks that, out of responsibility, for following the recommendations not to go out or be in closed places, “this is how it has to be”.
Adapted rituals
The best-known Christmas rituals have been adapted to the era of a coronavirus that has already left 37,000 dead in the city. The elaborate mass of the rooster in St. Patrick’s Cathedral could only be followed online. Also virtual was from the Apollo Kwanzaa Theater, the celebration of the Afro-American heritage in the city. The Rockettes save their energies for 2021 and for the first time since 1861 Santa hasn’t sat the kids on his knees at Macy’s.
To see the Rockefeller Center tree in person (if you get tired of watch a fir on livestream), you have to scan a QR code, wait for an SMS to tell you when to get in line and then take advantage of the five allotted minutes, in groups of four maximum. And as the museums, open but with reduced capacity, skating in his shadow on the ice rink is a matter with reserved time, mask and social distance. The same in Byrant Park, but at least next to the headquarters of the Public Library you can cross the ice without paying.
Almost no trace remains of the seven million tourists who visited the city in the last parties. There are no crowds or in the areas where they are usual and 100,000 people will not crowd Times Square on New Year’s Eve to see a ball go down and mark the arrival of a new year that so many wait so long. And unless you have a few hundred dollars to pay on the night of the 31st for one of the rooms with private terraces or views of the square offered by two hotels, the way to be present will be by writing, in person or by digital delivery or through social networks, a wish for 2021 in the ton of confetti that will be thrown on the sidewalks. Because the cameras will be ready to broadcast live. Even in this area where the posters of works from the nearby theaters of Broadway They are now just memories, or hope for May, ‘show must go on’.
‘Life must go on’
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Life also goes on in a New York changed where the void gains space, fill the time the pause, the apartment lights spend many more hours on and the global city has become extremely local, also at Christmas. I recognized it in advance until the official guide of the city when talking about these holidays. “The big events, shows, exhibitions and activities … Very little will be ‘business as usual’. But there is many things happening in the five neighborhoods”.
It is precisely neighborhoods within neighborhoods that continue to give life to New York. Because all over the place there are lowered blinds and posters in shop windows that in different ways say the same thing: “for rent”, “for rent”, “space available” … And they hurt especially when what has closed is a business where neighbors know their history because they have been part of it. But not only do you mourn what was lost, but you fight to maintain what you resist. There is a revived commitment to consumption and the local walk. Community networks are created. The volunteers they are lavish, more at this time. And this christmas New York’s heart beats. It does it simply at a different pace.
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