What joy winter break brought everyone – finally, a break from the stress of school. The only factor that could make the 2021 holiday season even better? The skyrocketing number of COVID-19 cases that occurred over break, keeping everyone from traveling and seeing their family members. With the increasing number of cases, people had unique and unusual winter break experiences. 

Many families planned holiday travels in advance to ensure that airline tickets and hotels would not be sold out. With this new variant, all that early-bird planning helped so many people. Not only were many people unable to travel, but many could not get a refund on some or all of their deposits. To make it all better, many people around the world were now stuck at home without being able to see anyone or do anything during the holidays. Isn’t it ironic that a positive test leads to such negative feelings?

This holiday season left everyone with more patience in many ways as people tried to find a store that still had rapid tests in stock, spent hours in line to get COVID-19 tested and then waited to find out whether they were positive or not. This variant spreads extremely fast compared to other variants – perfect timing for the holiday season!

One of the more wonderful parts about Omicron is how it kept families away from one another. For some people, they were the only members of their family to test positive, so they were the only ones not allowed to take part in the festivities. In other cases, the whole family tested positive, which resulted in houses full of sick people who could not do anything over the holidays — an ideal way to spend the season. Some even got COVID-19 a little later than everyone else, so when school started back up, it was back to the wonderful Zoom classes that caused students to never know what they were doing because they weren’t physically in school. What a lovely way to spend their time after not being able to see their families during the holidays; it’s the cherry on top.

People said “Happy Hanukkah,” ”Merry Christmas” or “Happy New Year,” but they really should have been saying, “Merry Omicron.”