Hunker down or happy holidays? How Alaskans are choosing to celebrate this week.

Amy Jackman, her friends and coworkers are gathering for a night of “Crabs and Cannabis” on Thanksgiving, Thursday ,Nov. 26, 2020, in Kenai, Alaska. (Photo courtesy Amy Jackman)
Amy Jackman, her friends, and coworkers are gathering for a night of “Crabs and Cannabis” on Thanksgiving, Thursday, Nov. 26, 2020, in Kenai. (Photo courtesy Amy Jackman)

Alaskans are finding ways to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday. But they’re having to balance the appeal of spending time with family and friends against the potential of contracting, and inadvertently spreading, COVID-19. 

Some are finding that choice easier than others. 

Amy Jackman, of Kenai, is doing exactly what she would be doing in any other year. She’s meeting with friends and coworkers for an evening she jokingly dubs “Crabs and Cannabis.”

“We bought 20 pounds of this really amazing crab meat… and we’ve all pitched in for it,” she said. 

She doesn’t really support the roots of Thanksgiving but said it’s more of an excuse to get together and find joy in each other’s company. 

“For me, and the people that are going to be gathering together — there was never even a second thought,” she said. “We’re together every week. We spend time having dinners with our families. We work together, we are basically cultivating and preserving this normalcy, right? Where we don’t live our lives in fear.” 

She is frustrated and concerned by the state and federal response to the spread of the virus — especially guidance about public masking and restrictions on the number of people who can gather in one place. 

“And it baffles me how many people are going outdoors or basically begging for tighter restrictions,” she said. 

Jackman worries that impacts like economic harm to businesses and isolation felt by children who are out of school and seniors who are cut-off from contact with the outside world are causing significantly more harm than the virus. 

But state health officials have repeatedly cautioned against gathering and helping to spread the virus. 

As coronavirus cases continue to climb, hospitals all over the state have warned that staffing shortages coupled with a surge in patients could be disastrous. 

The president of the Alaska State Hospital and Nursing Home Association, Jared Kosin, said on Tuesday that Thanksgiving celebrations could make it worse. 

Some Alaskans have changed their plans this year. 

Winter on the Elliot Highway in 2013. (Creative Commons photo by Jason Ahrns)
Winter on the Elliot Highway in 2013. (Creative Commons photo courtesy of Jason Ahrns)

In Fairbanks, Alyssa Enriquez generally hosts something of an orphans’ Thanksgiving, where people who have no other place to go can find company and food. 

But she didn’t feel comfortable doing that this year. She said a friend who is in her bubble is immuno-compromised. 

So Enriquez decided to unplug for the weekend. She rented the Fred Blixt cabin just off of the Elliot Highway, about an hour and a half north of Fairbanks. 

“I just want to be able to disconnect for the weekend, or for a couple of days, and not have to think about the world,” she said.  

Four friends will come to visit, but not all at the same time, and Enriquez says they’ll keep their interactions as safe as they can.

“The stuff we’re going to do as a group is probably going to be outside. And it’s supposed to be really warm. It’s supposed to be in the mid-20s here. It’s not too bad, at least it’s not 20 below,” Enriquez said. 

Even though a lot of things are different this year, Enriquez said it still feels like she’s following her normal holiday tradition of spending quality time with good friends. And in some ways, she thinks planning for a safe holiday might have helped her rethink her Thanksgiving traditions.

“It’s definitely scaled back, really thinking about who’s in my bubble. Really thinking about having a really nice time,” she said. “This is something I would probably do in the future so that it’s just being out in a cabin and enjoying the space and the presence that you’re in.”

Douglas Bridge in Juneau in December 2018 (Photo by David Purdy/KTOO)

In Juneau, Rebecca Smith also found a way to see friends and neighbors on Thursday, but it will be more of a take-home Thanksgiving. 

Her next door neighbor has a carport, and they’ve turned it into a party space. It has enough room to spread out chairs in groups for the three households that are coming. There will be some other stray friends and coworkers stopping by, too. 

“So this past week I had purchased some rope lights, and the next door neighbor had purchased some lights as well …. Then Jesse around the corner has a new propane heater, so he’s going to bring that over,” she said.

They’re all going to bring the dishes they normally eat to celebrate the holiday. Her neighbor is bringing sweet corn and drunken sweet potatoes. Rebecca Smith has smoked a turkey and is bringing cornbread stuffing, Chex mix, smoked cider and several other dishes. She said there will be plenty of pies.

Everyone will show up Thursday afternoon with their food. 

“We’ll socialize with masks on at their appropriate distances for a little bit, and then everybody just gets to pack up whatever food they want from all the offerings. Take it back home, reheat their Thanksgiving dinner so we can all eat the things we normally eat even if we can’t all eat them together. It’s our way of still sharing the holiday but still being responsible,” she said.

Like Enriquez, Rebecca Smith said her holiday tradition still feels intact. It’s still the same people. It’s still the same foods. 

“Oh, the other good thing is that I didn’t have to clean my house,” she said.

Smith said there was an unspoken agreement among her friends and neighbors that they have to make it work. 

“I think just because we are all so isolated at this point in time. We just have to cling to some way to make things as close to normal as we can. Nothing is going to be normal. Nothing is going to be normal for a long time, we’ve all come to that realization I think. And, quite frankly, it sucks,” Smith said. “I think we just all sort of, without even necessarily talking about it, we all just realized that we have to have something to celebrate.”  

Generally, she said she feels pretty comfortable with the group of people she’s seeing this week. They’ve been isolated or working alone, or they’ve been careful. But that’s not something she’s seeing reflected in the whole community.

“I look at the number of people who traveled this week. How full the airports were, having been fuller than they’ve been since March and I’m just like ‘you people are all insane,’ she said. “But clearly there are people who still aren’t taking this seriously. I’m worried because it’s clearly not going away. It’s not fake. It’s not a hoax. People are sick.” 

Eli Smith makes deviled eggs for his family’s Thanksgiving celebration on Thursday, Nov. 26, 2020, in Kenai. (Photo courtesy Todd Smith)

Normally, Todd Smith (no relation to Rebecca) would find a way to celebrate Thanksgiving with his extended Kenai family — parents, grandparents, siblings and their children. 

“You know, everybody ends up at somebody’s house,” he said. “We have family in Anchorage and Kenai, so we’ll kind of pick a spot and everybody meets up. We’ll have dinner, hang out for the weekend.”

And that could still have happened this year, though Smith said they would have had to put some thought into how to keep the parents and grandparents safe. 

But while Smith’s two kids are home for remote school, he and his wife Megan are still working. She works at a school in the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District, and he does plumbing and heating. His sister is a nurse in Anchorage. 

“We’re smart about it, but at the same time, we have more exposure every day, just out being about and working, than we do hanging out with our family,” he said. 

Plans changed when Smith and his family got sick with COVID-19 last week. It’s not clear where they picked up the virus.

“I don’t know, one of us got it. I got sick first, but several of our friends got it at the same time. Went in and got tested, three of four of us tested positive. We all three got sick,” he said.” My 14-year-old now says he didn’t feel good today, so we’ll see if he’s got it too.” 

So far, he said it’s just like a bad cold. But it’s lingering, and they’re tired.

Members of Todd Smith’s family meet up via Zoom to celebrate Thanksgiving together on Thursday, Nov. 26, 2020 in Kenai, Alaska. (Photo courtesy Todd Smith)
Members of Todd Smith’s family meet up via Zoom to celebrate Thanksgiving together on Thursday, Nov. 26, 2020, in Kenai. (Photo courtesy Todd Smith)

“I’m moving around, but I’m by no means completely recovered. It just hangs on,” he said. 

Once they got sick, any ideas they had about gathering with the rest of the family evaporated. And that influenced the rest of the family too. 

“The whole family now is like, ah we’ll just have our own little … We’re going to have a Zoom family Thanksgiving meeting and play a game or something. But I think everybody is probably just going to stay home,” he said. 

Rashah McChesney

Daily News Editor

I help the newsroom establish daily news priorities and do hands-on editing to ensure a steady stream of breaking and enterprise news for a local and regional audience.

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