I host two celebrations: Thanksgiving and a New Year’s Day Open House.  Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday – my shorthand for it is “great food and no presents.”  I took the occasion of my divorce, back in 1976, to celebrate it with friends rather than family and have done so ever since.  Last year I couldn’t have it because of Covid, but this year I did.  Seven friends attended.  I do the turkey, stuffing, and gravy; they bring everything else.  It was sparked by my 86-year-old former colleague and role model, Renate, who asked me if I was doing Thanksgiving this year.  I said, “Will you come?”  “Of course,” she answered, even though she lives on the far Upper West side of Manhattan and I’m in Park Slope, Brooklyn.  It was a lovely occasion.

     Recently, with the arrival of the Delta and Omicron variants of Covid, I cancelled my New Year’s Day Open House for this year.  Everyone who wrote me agreed that I’d done the right thing, even though they were disappointed.  Hopefully, we’ll be able to celebrate together next year.

     This mixture of joy and sorrow defines the human condition.  Twenty years ago, after 9/11, I was teaching history at Brooklyn College.  9/11 was a Tuesday, the college was closed Wednesday, and classes resumed on Thursday.  In my two morning classes, we discussed what had happened.  My third course, Tudor-Stuart England, met after lunch.  When I asked the students if they wanted to talk about what happened, they answered “No, we’ve been talking about it all morning.”  Then they said, “Take us back to the past.”  Since it was only September, we were still in the 1400s.  I replied, “Where there was only the Black Plague (which killed one-third of Europe’s population) to worry about.”  Tragedy and hope prevailed then and still do now.  So here’s hoping that next year will be better and we’ll have a happier New Year, even knowing that then there will be other things to worry about.