No it’s not christmas

So good the crown hits nowWe said in March. With sunshine and spring in the air, the closure was habitable. Imagine if this had happened in November, we said. Imagine celebrating Christmas with your family in Teams.

Fast forward to the end of November. Hundreds of thousands are out of work. We have a liquor ban, assembly bans, higher education is digital, and Christmas concerts have been canceled. The strict infection control measures will last until the week before Christmas, and probably longer. Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent. Erna Solberg has become the Grinch, who ruins Christmas. Next week he will tell us what it will be like, he said at the Thursday afternoon press conference.

Trump foresaw this

One month ago Christmas was used as motivation for adjustment. The goal is for all children to be able to hug their grandparents at Christmas, said then-Minister of Education Guri Melby. Now the tone is different, the statements of the ministers on Christmas have become increasingly alert. Little by little they have been preparing us all for the message that will arrive next week. Christmas this year will not be as usual.

At the moment, neither the political nor the health authorities will refuse to go home for Christmas. Fortunately. The ban on national travel will end the respect of the measures. The police will have a lot to do if they want to keep track of all those who want to travel anyway.

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Many of us always travel with family to other places at Christmas. I have celebrated 41 of my 42 Christmas nights at Sunnmøre. Therefore, of course, a long time ago I thought of various quarantine possibilities and considered homeschooling the child the last week before the holidays. I have a plan A, a plan B and a plan C. Of course the government has it too.

The educational challenge It’s great: The authorities should try to maintain the high level of trust in them and infection control measures, while also making us change our behavior during the most important family vacations we have.

Espen Nakstad has recently gone from study to study to prepare us, often figuratively, through infection-safe digital solutions. The entire Norwegian Deputy Director of Health has asked us to carefully consider where and how we travel. Cancel the big New Year’s parties. And he asked us to be very careful the last week before we left.

This has never happened before

Norwegian corona monitor shows communication is working. The closer we get to Christmas, the more we realize that it won’t be business as usual. Two weeks ago, 61 percent of us had understood this, and 90 percent had dropped out of Christmas dinners. In other words, we are now ready for the strict message that Erna Solberg will keep.

But we don’t have to wait On the Prime Minister, good advice is now available. The municipal chief doctors of Sunnmøre, for example, have given five good tips for students and others who are planning to go home for Christmas. The advice is exemplary concrete, liberatingly logical, and absolutely for living.

How to celebrate Christmas with a clear conscience: In the last week before you go on vacation, you should meet as few as possible. Take care of infection control on the trip. Test yourself when you arrive: The prime minister said Wednesday that you can do well before you go. During the first few days of the vacation, you should limit your contact to the people you live with. Do not meet with friends and grandparents, at least not until you have received a negative response to the corona test. And as Health Minister Bent Høie has said every day since March: hold your meter, wash your hands, and stay home when you’re sick.

Doctors don’t call it a quarantine, but they mean a kind of quarantine. One week before departure and three days before arrival. It is doable for most of us. The recommendations of the national health authorities are stricter and apply to the rest: be careful during the first ten days after you have returned home for Christmas.

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Erna Solberg is probably reluctant be the Grinch, but that’s his destiny. The great thing about the Norwegian infection control system is that various professional advice is brought to the table before the politicians decide.

At the press conference, Solberg confirmed that the government is considering closing schools a little before Christmas. Now you have to decide if we are allowed to travel, if we have to self-quarantine when we arrive, and if we can meet the older grandparents. At Christmas he arrives with continuous advice on up to five guests and quarantined for the first ten days of the holidays. Like the Christmas tables, the big Christmas parties are canceled.

Christmas will simply be less festive this year. But it can still be close and hot.