Don’t let schools cancel Christmas

School nativity plays have become the latest casualty of Covid. Around one in four primary teachers say their schools are planning to have their Christmas shows online this year. And 10 per cent say their schools won’t be doing any such shows at all.

This may seem trivial to some (namely, the perpetually joyless), but it isn’t. Through repeated lockdowns, children have had to endure lost learning, isolation and misery. My son turns five this week. A big chunk of his life has been spent living in a world of sustained health paranoia – a world in which some adults feel it is perfectly acceptable to wince when he comes close to them in a supermarket. He doesn’t know any different but we, as adults, do – and it’s time we all agreed that enough is enough.

Even before the Omicron-variant panic, my son’s school informed parents that this year, we would not be allowed to attend the nativity play. Instead, we were told we would be offered a recording of the event. I expressed my irritation to some fellow mums but was met with a mixture of apathy and apocalypticism. One mother said, ‘this is the world we live in now – we have to expect that life will never be the same’.

Seriously? Sure, before the vaccine arrived I might have sympathised with this view. But no longer. There has to come a point at which reasonable, rational people are allowed to enter the room and say that this has gone on for far too long. Covid is not going away any time soon; it is here for the foreseeable future. We must learn to live with it.

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