How to Get Your Family Through a Pandemic Holiday

If you won’t be able to see family as you usually do this holiday due to the coronavirus (whether you’re doing your part to reduce the spread of COVID-19 or a loved one has passed), you may be wondering how to explain this to your kids and how to ensure they still have a happy holiday season, despite how confusing everything is right now. We spoke with Jill S. Cohen, CT, family grief counselor, to get the best advice for having a conversation with kids about missing loved ones this holiday and for making sure this holiday is filled with happy memories for the whole family. Use this advice to help your family get through a very different and confusing holiday season, while ensuring that your own stress and anxiety levels are managed, too.

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Explaining Why Your Loved One isn’t Around this Holiday

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends small gatherings limited to only the members of your own household this holiday season. This means anyone who doesn’t currently live in your house—like grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends—may not be a part of your holiday celebrations like they have in years past. Cohen, who offers in-person and virtual private practice grief counseling for children and adults, suggests explaining to young ones that the reason some loved ones can’t be around this year is because of how much you truly love them:

“We really, really want to be with [family members] this holiday, but for the same reason we haven’t been going to our friends’ houses or to school or to restaurants, we can’t be with them this holiday. We love them so much that we don’t want to get them sick if we have bad germs or they have bad germs. If we have the holiday without them this year, we can hopefully see them soon and next holiday, too. When we love someone, we don’t want to get them sick.”

On the other hand, some family members may not be present at your gathering this year due to passing, whether from COVID-19 or other causes. This can be even more difficult to help your child reconcile with, but Cohen reminds us that allowing your child to grieve and encouraging them to talk about the lost loved one is important.

“Acknowledge that this is a sad time for all of us, and we feel sad and we might even cry because our heart hurts without them being there. It's okay to feel our feelings and be sad and mad that they are not here,” Cohen says.

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Remind your children that the loved one will always be in your hearts and you can still talk about them, play the games they liked, eat the foods they liked, and even go around and say why you were thankful to have that person in your life. Some of the other things Cohen does when working with children to prepare for holidays without a loved one include:

• Going around and sharing a memory of them

• Bringing something to the holiday that reminds you of them and explaining why

• Journaling or writing letters to them

• Creating a book that’s called “I miss you this holiday season because…”

• Drawing pictures of them

• Making candles and lighting them in honor of your loved one

• Ordering a photo mug or glass with the picture of your loved one

• Making a special gift you would have given to your loved one

• Reading some children’s books about grief together

• Making a photo collage

How to Get Uninterested Kids Involved in the Celebration

When kids or teens don’t get their way, the alternative can be uninteresting to them. You might spend days planning an alternate holiday celebration for your kids only for them to be irritable and not want to be involved. If this happens, try to make the situation light and poke fun at the whole thing. Call Thanksgiving “the Not Thanksgiving” and have everyone pick a food to add to the meal that is not typical of Thanksgivings past, like sushi appetizers or pizza. Family games are also a great way to get kids involved in the conversation, although maybe initially begrudgingly, Cohen suggests. Here are some of our favorite family board games. Maybe you’ll get matching Christmas pajamas for the whole family or have an ugly Christmas sweater contest, too.