The Christmas that went wrong: The day was saved by the new friend I’d made on a drunken night out
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I was alone in New York during the pandemic, in the aftermath of a breakup and unable to go home. A Korean family taught me to believe in the kindness of strangers. Like many Jewish families, the Wolfsons take Christmas extremely seriously. Latkes and smoked salmon are served before homemade cranberry sauce and brussels sprouts. My dad’s hand-painted menorah, which he made during the ceramics cafe boom of the early 2000s, sits proudly underneath the Christmas tree.
![[Sam Wolfson]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2018/09/17/Sam_Wolfson,_L.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
As such, I had never missed a Christmas with the family – although there had been some near misses. In 2019, we spent Christmas by my dad’s hospital bed after his stroke – us sipping on hospital canteen gingerbread lattes, him having Christmas dinner in the guise of vanilla-scented protein, fed through a tube. In 2020, I saw my family only from six feet away, double-masked and on the doorstep. I delivered presents, but they were not opened for a few days, to let any stray virus dissipate.
But in October 2021, I had moved to New York to escape a breakup for the ages and another dark British winter spent maintaining unsocial distance. In New York, there had been no second or third lockdowns; while you had to flash a vaccine card before entering a bar, once inside there was a we’re-all-gonna-die-anyway attitude to infection that was more in line with my mental state at the time.
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