When I begin to despair or feel overwhelmed by national news, one of the most helpful responses I know is to turn my focus back to my local community and local politics—not just because local events have a more immediate impact on me, but also because I can have a more immediate impact on local events.
Quality local news coverage is critical to being locally aware. If you’re in Tucson, here are three small locally run, locally focused independent news outlets you can support right now.
All of these news sources are available to read for free. But they also all have subscribe, support, or donate options. If you want to do something concrete right now–if you want to support something that matters right now–supporting these outlets would be an excellent place to start.
Not in Tucson? Tell us about local independent news outlets you find worth supporting in the comments.
As I snuggled in with my husband and my then-first-grader to watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, I looked forward to sharing my childhood memories of Rankin and Bass’ claymation classic.
Within five minutes of pressing play, though, all I could think was, “Why is everyone being so mean?”
The first time I told my daughter the truth about Santa Claus, she was three years old.
She came home from child care full of excitement and anxiety, hoping, hoping, hoping she’d been good enough for Santa to come. We’d never really talked about Santa in our Jewish-Quaker household, though we did visit my in-laws for a secular Christmas celebration each year. But I looked at my child now, full of earnest hope and anxiety, and I knew I didn’t want her to see her Christmas gifts as some sort of reflection on her character or worth.
So at bedtime I said, tentatively, “You know, some people believe Santa Claus is real. Others believe he’s a story.” Saying something was a story was a common way of explaining things in our household. As the child of two writers, my daughter already knew that stories were important, even precious. To say something was a story was to describe it, not to diminish it.
This time, though, when I said Santa might be a story, my daughter looked right at me and said, “That’s not true.”
Faced with such strong conviction and will to believe, I didn’t press the matter, not then.
And I did quietly—if a little uneasily—relabel one of my husband and mine’s Christmas gifts to be from Santa, rather than us.
Photo courtesy of Canva/YekoPhotoStudio
Lots of Jewish kids grow up wishing they could celebrate Christmas, but I don’t remember doing so, maybe because I grew up in a town with enough Jewish kids that schools closed not just for Christmas, but also for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and the first couple of days of Passover. On the playground Jewish and Christian kids fiercely debated whose winter holidays delivered more presents, but the idea that we all should celebrate one or the other wasn’t even on the table.
I did grow up believing in Santa Claus, though. I listened for sleigh bells Christmas Eve, opened a token gift beside a neighbor’s tree Christmas Day, and accepted without bitterness that of course Santa Claus couldn’t deliver any gifts to our house, seeing as we were Jewish and all. My family’s Hanukkah gifts were numbered by day and laid out on top of my father’s oversized stereo system, where my brother and sister and I could try to guess at their contents as we shook them and tried to see through the wrapping paper.
I don’t remember when I stopped believing Santa was real. I think it must not have been any one big moment at all. I just remember continuing to watch the usual round of animated Christmas specials this year, knowing they were stories, knowing they weren’t my story, and feeling no sorrow at either of these facts.
I did wish, though, that we could have had a few Hanukkah specials, too.
When I was 11, my mom brought home our first Christmas tree. She’d been at a party for work, and when the party was over they were going to throw the tree away. She told us she couldn’t let that happen, so she rescued the tree instead.
It was my first hint that maybe my mom, or the child my mom had been, was a little sad the Christmas story wasn’t hers, even if I wasn’t.
For me, the tree was an uncomfortable and alien presence, and I hung homemade paper strings of dreidels and Jewish stars on its greenery to make it feel less Christian. At 11, I liked being Jewish, and I had no desire to be anything else.
My brother, who was attending a private Christian kindergarten that year, loved that tree, and he cheerfully moved all our Hanukkah presents under it. I grumpily moved them back to my dad’s stereo, where I was sure God intended them to be. My brother moved the presents back to the tree again, I moved them back to the stereo again. I’m pretty sure this went on until the presents themselves were finally opened.
I assume God had more important things to worry about than where my family put their Hanukkah gifts, but this was never really about presents or trees. It was about identity. In America, Christmas and Santa cultural forces that pull everyone into the discussion, no matter what they believe.
Photo courtesy of Canva/annuoka
A decade later, our second Christmas tree stretched from floor to ceiling and was covered with store-bought Christmas ornaments. It came with a new step family who laughed at the Hebrew words of our Hanukkah prayers, and with a new town where our family‘s presence was enough to double the local Jewish population. The identity and cultural issues that raised could easily fill a blog post of their own.
My daughter didn’t continue believing in Santa forever, of course. When she was ready, she came back to me and asked, “Is Santa real?”
She was five then, and no longer worried about being good or bad enough to get presents. Instead she was just trying to figure out how the world worked, what was true and what wasn’t true, as so many children are.
I gave her the honest answer her honest question wanted. With two years to think about it, I was less tentative. “Santa is a story,” I said. “A story that some people enjoy believing.”
For a little while after that she went back and forth between believing and not believing, sometimes at the exact same time. She repeated her question a time or two more along the way, but then she knew. Santa was a story. This wasn’t a great tragedy, for her or for us, and it wasn’t the beginning of some mysterious loss of innocence. Nothing was diminished by the knowledge that Santa was real, least of all my daughter’s sense of wonder.
In a universe where dinosaurs really did once walk the earth and planets really are spinning through the vastness of space, it’s hard to imagine honest answers to honest questions ever diminishing our sense of wonder.
But that’s not the end, not quite. Because it turns out all my honest answers had caveats.
“Some people believe Santa Claus is real,” I said when my daughter was three, before I told her what I believed, that Santa is a story. Even when she was five, it wasn’t enough to tell her Santa was a story. I felt the need to add, “A story that some people enjoy believing.”
Of course they do, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that—except that I felt the need to defend the lie even as I told the truth. The reason is no great mystery. We all feel the pressure not to “ruin” Christmas for kids who believe Santa is real, no matter our traditions or what we ourselves believe.
Different families have different customs, something I’ve used to explain everything from screen time rules to why we have to wear shoes outside to who is and isn’t getting a slushie on the way home from the park. Yet I don’t ask other parents to make their kids put on shoes just because mine is wearing them, and I don’t expect other parents to get their kids a slushie after a play date just because my kid is getting one. The story of Santa is different from other stories. It’s the one story where we’re not content to respectfully let different families have different traditions and beliefs. It’s the one story that we all, even children, are expected to deny our own truths to protect.
That has implications for identity, too.
Or as Rabbi Ruti Regan put it in a twitter thread a few years ago, “It bothers me that Jewish children are expected to help Christian parents lie to their children about Santa Claus. Minority culture kids should not have to be afraid that they will face retaliation from majority-culture adults for saying things that are true.”
Courtesy of Canva/etorres69
Families have the right to teach their children to believe in Santa Claus. They have the right to celebrate the holidays any way they choose, and to take joy in doing so. But it’s not my family’s job to lie about our beliefs to protect your traditions, any more than it’s your family’s job to pack kosher-for-Passover meals so my kid won’t feel left out at the lunch table.
It’s a tricky, sometimes uncomfortable juggling act, this business of raising children in a world where not everyone believes as we do. Members of minority religions, along with those who don’t identify with any religion, already have a lot of practice with this act. Maybe it shouldn’t all be on us. Maybe it’s time everyone else take on their share of responsibility and juggling, too.
What I’m saying is, yes, listen for sleigh bells this Christmas Eve, if that’s your thing. Find all the magic and joy there is to be found in that, as well as in opening the presents your traditions say the sleigh and its driver will leave behind. We can all use magic and joy, and the fact that we find it in so many different places is wondrous, too.
Just stop asking the rest of to say that we hear sleigh bells, too.
Bones of Faerie, the first book of my Bones of Faerie trilogy, is about uncontrolled growth: plants that bloom in every season, crops that fight their harvesters, trees that seek human blood and bone to root in.
Faerie Winter, the second book of the trilogy, tells the opposite story. It’s about endless winter, failure to grow, and the fear that spring might never come.
During our current physical and psychological winter, Faerie Winter is the book I’ve been thinking about.
The story’s protagonist, Liza, is surrounded by adults who remember countless other winters, followed by countless other springs. Liza was born after the war between faeries and humans banished winter from her world, though. She’s never known anything but deadly, unbounded growth. When that growth stops at last, Liza’s first thought is about how much safer the forests have become. Later, when she realizes that those forests have also stopped producing the things humans need to survive, she has no mental roadmap for what might happen next.
When Jayce, a member of Liza’s town’s council, talks about preparing for spring planting, Liza wonders at the fact.
If he feared that the spring crops wouldn’t grow, he gave no sign. Adults believed, somewhere deep inside, that spring would come, for all that they were careful of our rations. Some part of them couldn’t imagine that green wouldn’t return to the world, as if green was something we were born to. I did not understand it. Deep inside I felt as if this gray had surely gone on forever and the forests I’d fought all my life had been merely illusions.
Not all the adults in Liza’s world share Jayce’s certainty, though. As the story progresses, Liza flees a danger that comes from beyond the dying forest with Karin, a fey survivor of the War. Karin is a plant mage, keenly aware of the changes winter has brought to the world, and she asks aloud the question that human adults have not.
The grasses sighed wearily and retreated back into the snow. “They’re not dead,” I said. “Not completely, not around you.”
“They are not dead.” Karin sounded as tired as the grasses had. “But they are dying. Tell me, Liza, do you believe that spring will come?”
Why ask me? I was no plant mage. “The adults in my town believe it.” They believed in spite of the gray trees and the gray skies, the failed crops and the too-long winter.
“So it is with the human adults in my town as well.” Karin held a hand out to the falling snow as we walked on. Snowflakes melted against her skin. “Yet I have never heard the trees so quiet. They yearn for darkness, and some have given way to it. Others slip into sleep, accepting that they may never wake. I am told this is the way of your world. It is not the way of mine. I have never known a forest that was not green. What do you believe?”
Do you believe that spring will come? It’s a question I’ve returned to many times since I wrote Faerie Winter. It’s a question I was asking before I wrote that book, too, before fiction led me, as it so often does, to put into words the things I was already saying.
Because Faerie Winter is fantasy, the question of spring’s return is not merely metaphoric. It turns out the danger of endless winter is real, and so Liza’s inner crisis is echoed by the world’s outer one. Fantasy does that, sometimes—lets us transform internal struggles into external realities so that we can face those struggles head on and in a more concrete way than other types of stories allow.
Do you believe that spring will come? Things have changed so much already—in Liza’s world, in our world. There’s no changing them back. Do we believe that forward change will continue instead, leading us on to someplace new, someplace viable, someplace where things can grow once more?
Do you believe that spring will come? There’s a strange comfort simply in putting the question into words.
On one level, I know the answer, always have known it. If I didn’t believe, deep down, that spring—that the future—would come, writing a book where spring was called into question would have been too much to bear.
On another level, I need, just as deeply, to hear the question asked, and I need to travel the hard path toward its answer, again and again, not just in the books that I’ve written but also in the countless books that I’ve read through the years, ever since I knew how to read. Stories were the thing, after all, that got me trough childhood and adolescence and all that came after. Every misunderstood kid who had adventures and saved the world and found their place in that world was, in their way, another needed answer.
An answer, and also a map—the map Liza lacks—for what the journey might look like. Spring comes. Not always easily, not always painlessly, not always as quickly as we want or as we need, but in the end and at the last. Spring comes. Deep down, I know that.
Can we take a moment to recognize the strength and resilience of elementary-school-aged kids during this pandemic?
They’re putting on their masks and their backpacks and walking into school on their own every morning, even the littlest ones, whose parents couldn’t follow them on campus for their first day of kindergarten this year. They’re learning how to learn at a distance, no more hugs from their teachers, no more sharing a pencil or a snack or a high five with their classmates. Even so, they’re still finding ways to have fun with their friends. They’re still growing, socially and emotionally as well as physically.
Or else they’re booting up borrowed laptops at home, working their way through packets of worksheets on the couch or the bed or the kitchen table or a quiet corner of the closet. They’re learning surrounded by the noise and chaos of their families, or else in the silence of a home where everyone else is busy working, too, even the grownups. When they’re missing their friends, they bring their cats and their dogs and their stuffies with them into their virtual classrooms. They’re learning how to learn on their own, even as they keep their friendships alive through video chats and outdoor play dates and shared Minecraft worlds
Or else they’re simply hanging in there, day after day, while learning and friends become increasingly distant memories. They’re caring for themselves and their even-younger siblings full time while their parents work, or they’re struggling to survive on their own, in homes where emotional or physical violence are—or have become—the norm, without the option of escaping into a classroom for a few hours a day.
For some kids, the victory is that they’re continuing to learn and grow and connect with their friends. For others, the victory is that they’re surviving at all.
They’re heroes, every last one of them.
As adults, facing so many of our own real challenges right now, it’s easy not to notice this. Let’s stop and notice it now. Remember how, when you were a kid, summer seemed to last forever? For today’s kids, Covid-19 has been three summers long—so far. But they’re still here, still surviving and, on good days, even thriving. They’re handling an impossible situation, if not perfectly, still with more strength and grace than many grownups.
Let me not to the counting of true ballots Admit impediments. Votes are not votes That alter when they alteration find, Or bend with the remover to remove. O no! They are an ever-fixed mark That wait on counting, patient and unshaken. They are a star for every governing bark, Their precious worth shall not be taken By those impatient fools who lightly seek To bend time’s sickle to some baser goal Than truth. The truth is not so weak, But bears its witness, to the edge of doom, Wary of error, careful and unmov’d, Until the people’s will at last be prov’d.
Twinkle twinkle little star, How I wonder how you are. Up above the world so high, Socially distanced in the sky. Twinkle twinkle little star, Text and tell me how you are.
Little Miss Muffet, Sat on a tuffet, Waiting for curds and whey. But the Instacart driver, Came unmasked to find her, And frightened Miss Muffet away.
The wheel on your tablet Goes round and round, Round and round, Round and round. The wheel on your tablet Goes round and round— Too bad, I need the wifi.
This little piggy went to Walmart. This little piggy stayed home. This little piggy bought toilet paper. This little piggy had none. This little piggy went wee wee wee all the way home.
Humpty Dumpty sat on the Wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, Were out of personal protective gear so Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
I wasn’t happy when schools closed last March, but I understood and accepted it—accepted that we had to hunker down for a few months to get this virus under control. By August, the worst would be over, and my daughter would be back in school.
For a month, two months, it seemed we’d get there. Arizona’s Covid cases were rising, but our total numbers remained relatively low. Sheltering in place and enduring daily remote learning meltdowns seemed to be working. It hard, but just a couple more rough months now and we could back to normal in the fall.
One day, we’ll even get to play on the playgrounds again. This is not that day. (Photo by Allie on Unsplash)
And then, in mid-May, Arizona—like so many states—just gave up.
Our Covid cases were still rising, but suddenly no one seemed to care. The governor’s stay at home order expired in mid-May. By the end of the month, pretty much everything was open: restaurants, gyms, beauty salons, the mall. The governor wouldn’t even allow cities to pass mask mandates to mitigate the harm until several weeks later.
Only schools remained closed. Only teachers and families seemed to get that there was still a pandemic going on. The school year was almost over. I hung on to the faint hope that staying home now would let us break our isolation in time for the first day of school. Getting in-person school back up and running was the one, the most, important thing right now.
But too many people didn’t understand that. Too many people just had to eat out, go to the gym, hang out at the bar, and get a hair cut immediately, rather than waiting another month or two. Our numbers kept rising, more steeply now, and too many didn’t seem to care. Arizona took it’s turn as the world’s Covid19 hotspot, but unlike most of the hotspots before us, we had time to see it coming. We knew what would happen.
It didn’t have to be like this.
I mean, it could have been like this. We could have already been at the rainbow-after part of the story. (Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash)
Our family, like so many families, did all we could. It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough, when so many others were doing nothing at all. Even now, when bars and gyms have finally closed again, restaurants and retail stores remain open. I guess the people filling those places think their right to eat out with their friends is more important than my kid’s right to get an education and hang out with her friends.
So we’re not going back to in-person school this August. Of course we’re not.
And people still don’t get it. Instead of embracing the selfishness and sacrifice needed to get kids back to learning and their parents back to work, too many have doubled down on their own selfishness instead. Too many keep insisting they have the right to skip the mask, to eat out, to party with as many friends as they wanted.
Too many seem to believe, at the exact same time, that teachers and children have no rights at all, that we’re the selfish ones for not sucking it up and returning to a highly contagious, potentially deadly, environment just so that everyone else can keep on pretending everything’s back to normal.
The people refusing to wear masks or order takeout—the people who got us into this mess to begin with—couldn’t possibly be to blame. Only those of us unwilling to live with the consequences of the situation they created were to blame.
I hope that was one hell of a steak dinner you all had, one hell of a haircut, one hell of drink, one hell of a workout. Was it was good enough to be worth convincing yourself that no one but you matters, that actions don’t have consequences, that there can be freedom without responsibility or the basic community-minded patriotism of Americans looking out for one another.
I’ve always tried to avoid dividing this country into us vs. them, always tried to understand that everything looks different depending where you’re standing, that everyone deep down believes they’re doing the right thing.
But today—today I’m just angry. Angry that my governor and my legislature and far too many of my fellow Arizonans couldn’t be patient a few months more. Angry that my state values its restaurants and gyms and bars and malls so much more than it values its people.
Angry that, next week, my daughter isn’t going back to school in person after all.
Tomorrow, I know, I’ll get back to enduring. Remote learning will probably be a little better this time around. Even if it isn’t, I’ll make it through, somehow. All of us with school-age children will. We’ll manage for as long as we have to. We have no choice.
But the rest of you could at least help us out here. While teachers are trying to teach without the in-person interaction they excel at, while kids are trying to learn without the in-person interaction their development demands, while parents are trying to somehow juggle work and the stress of helping their kids through it all, for the most part without childcare or even the occasional babysitter—while we’re getting through, day by day—you can wear your damn mask. You can keep your damn social distance. You can party over Zoom like the rest of us. You can cook your own damn meals.
I don’t care anymore what sort of denial you’re relying on to convince yourself this is all no big deal. I do care that you’re more concerned with your right to continue doing whatever you want uninterrupted, without a thought for those of us whose entire lives will be interrupted that much longer as a result.
I need for you to be the ones to grow up, make sacrifices, and hunker down with the rest of us so that we all can get back to normal sooner rather than later.
I’d love for my daughter to get to meet her new teacher in person by January. But I can’t make that happen alone.
I need all of you there with me.
It’s too late to start at square one. But maybe, if everyone gets it together now, we can jump into the school year at square five or so instead of missing the game entirely. (Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash)
At my daughter’s elementary school, every child learns three things from the first day of kindergarten on: “Be kind and respectful. Be responsible. Be safe.” These principles inform every aspect of school life, creating a caring atmosphere that’s one of the reasons I love her school and want to send her back in person this fall.
But I can’t.
Our school is currently offering both online and in-person options, and at first I struggled with which to choose. Yet if I ask myself the same questions my child has been taught to ask, the answer is clear.
Is returning in person kind?
I recently attended a (virtual) school board meeting. District teachers spoke, often tearfully, about how they were being forced to choose between a career they love and—quite possibly—their lives and the lives of their loved ones. Unlike district families, teachers aren’t being given a choice. If they’re assigned to teach in person, they need to either show up or resign.
It’s a cruel choice, and kindness demands I not ask teachers to make it. Instead, by agreeing to learn remotely, I help increase the number of teachers who can teach remotely.
Is it respectful?
Throughout the United States, teachers are terrified of returning to face to face learning. Here in Arizona educators have already died, even while socially distancing, even on relatively empty campuses. What will happen when our facilities are closer to full?
Respect demands I recognize that our teachers’ lives are just as important as our children’s lives. If I respect educators, I can’t put them in harm’s way for my own benefit.
Is it responsible?
Arizona’s per-capita rate of Covid-19 cases are among the highest in the country, as are the resulting deaths, and our hospitals are running out of ICU beds.
Responsibility demands not giving our tapped-out public health system more cases to treat. It demands I step up and do my part to help my community maintain the capacity to treat all who are sick, so that our hospitals don’t have to make life-or-death decisions about who receive care and who doesn’t.
Is it safe?
Remote learning has been challenging for my daughter and me, as it has been for so many families, and I have a new appreciation of the ways the benefits of face-to-face learning extend far beyond academic achievement. I want so badly for my child to experience those benefits once more.
But like my child, I have to accept that sometimes, being safe means we can’t always do what we want. Evidence is growing that single greatest Covid-19 risk is simply sharing an enclosed space with other people, breathing the same air for an extended period of time. That’s pretty much the definition of classroom learning, and I’ve yet to see a plan effectively mitigates that risk.
Safety demands I not send my child into this dangerous situation, even if she wants to be there, even if I want her to be there, too. Not yet.
Not until Arizona’s Covid-19 numbers drop—and our understanding of the virus grows—enough that we can return in a way that truly is kind, respectful, responsible, and safe.
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