‘We’ll have to muddle through somehow’

That beautiful Christmas song so bittersweetly sung by Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis — “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” — was recently spotlighted in the news because of its melancholy reflection of a Christmas without the joys of being with family. It’s a song that was written during World War II, when families were separated and in the midst of hard sacrifice and struggle.

Now, it’s the “perfect pandemic Christmas song.”

That label causes me to recoil, at least at first, but when looking at the original lyrics, I find that the old is new again:

“Someday soon we all will be together.
If the fates allow.
Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.

“Once again as in olden days
Happy golden days of yore
Faithful friends who were dear to us
Will be near to us once more.”

As many of us are saying these days, this song hits especially hard right now. While some are choosing to celebrate as they normally do, gathering together with friends and family around the dinner table for Christmas and New Year’s, I want to believe most of us are foregoing our usual gatherings this year in order to help protect one another — putting off seeing our loved ones now so that we may be able to get together again in the future, safely.

Many of us are facing more loneliness, isolation and sadness than ever before because we’re choosing the health and safety of themselves and their families over feeling temporarily comfortable and happy.

It’s not just a thing that we are doing flippantly or dramatically, but cautiously, carefully and painfully.

As for Paul and I, we had to make a difficult choice this year to miss Thanksgiving and Christmas with family on Long Island. We knew it was the right thing to do, even if it hurt us and hurt feelings in the process. So, we had our own merry little Christmas in our NYC apartment.

We cooked our own dishes, trimmed our own little tree, stuffed our stockings and made the most of it, still heavy with the grief of not being with family members. It was hard even though we had a nice time. We muddled through.

I tend to do it well—when my parents divorced; when my father died; when my family stopped doing Christmas together; when I moved to New York alone; and when I couldn’t visit my family over the years, including this one.

This song’s resonance isn’t new to me, but it is especially sharp this year and cuts through some of that scar tissue I’ve built up around my heart. Maybe it’s because so many others are feeling it, too. Knowing that we’re all feeling the loss and sorrow of not being together and happy with family is a consolation in some sad sense.

I also see that for so many years, we’ve been able to have beautiful Christmases together and are able to relive those memories again and again in our minds and hearts, and I’m so thankful for that. Those memories are what help me muddle through these tough times so that one day we can have more blissful days of togetherness without sickness, or fear or needless loss.

While I’m not naive to think 2021 will be back to “normal,” I am holding on to the hope that “someday soon we all will be together.”