The holiday season is beloved in part because it is a time where magic seems to be possible and suspension of traditional beliefs comes naturally. After all, who’s to say it’s impossible for a small, isolated group of reindeer located far from humanity’s prying eyes to have evolved the ability to fly from one ice-capped island to another in search of food during blustery North Pole winters?

Of course, once we’re knocked back into reality by the icy winds of mid-January and are forced to wake up early each morning to scrape ice off our windshields and mirrors, it becomes considerably harder to proclaim this to be “the most wonderful time of the year” with any sort of warm sincerity.

This winter, especially, may hold the most bittersweet holiday season many of us have ever had – and hopefully will ever have.

If you’re doing things properly and are adhering to public health restrictions, chances are you will be missing someone that you care about dearly. You may not get to see a friend or a relative that you have always seen and always been able to celebrate with. You may worry about foregoing some long-standing tradition that has endured all manner of past crises. You are probably wondering if you can do something in between a full visit and staying in your own home – or if heeding the advice of health experts will make any difference in the long run.

We can’t make decisions for anybody, and we certainly understand the psychology in wanting to gather with loved ones at the end of a year that has brought so much pain and uncertainty. However, out of fairness for the ones who don’t have a choice but to exercise the highest levels of caution when it comes to avoiding the virus, we have to once again urge as many people as possible to do the right thing and just stay home this year.

We remain in the midst of the worst surge of this virus since it began in the spring. Restrictions and finger-wagging have failed to contain it, as have the shocking video reports of overburdened hospitals resorting to treating patients in parking lots across the country.

The holiday season is supposed to be a time of selfless thought and empathy for your neighbors. We would ask those planning to disregard the warnings against gathering with people outside of your household to consider the healthcare workers who will be unable to celebrate at all this year – both because they are too busy taking care of the sick and because they are too aware of the harmful potential of the virus to put any of their loved ones at risk.

We ask those who still somehow believe that the response to the virus is overblown and unnecessary to consider corrections officer Lt. Russell Freeman – an otherwise healthy 52-year-old who passed away last week after contracting the virus. He is the first state worker to die of COVID-related causes. We ask you to consider the elderly who are stuck quarantined in nursing homes because of the real risk that they may perish if infected with the virus.

Your actions are not isolated while in the midst of a pandemic. Every time you interact with people outside of your home, you chance catching or passing on the virus, which can then be transmitted to many more people. Eventually, your contact with someone could wind up being the catalyst that leads to another unnecessary, untimely death for another innocent member of our society – a neighbor, a mother, a son, a friend.

The only hope that we can offer is that there is an end in sight. Vaccinations have begun and are already numbering in the hundreds of thousands. We could very well see a normal summer in 2021, but we can be certain that this will only be the case if we take seriously our responsibility to one another now, in the waning days of a year where we have already been tested like never before.

Our most crucial test yet through this unprecedented crisis is upon us, and the results will not be recorded through numbers on a page, but within the somber passages of the obituaries page.

We don’t need holiday magic in order to get to that brighter future and a normal summer of deserved celebration – we just need to continue to do the right things we already know how to do.