EDITOR’S LETTER

PHOTO BY LIA CROWE

certainty in uncertain times

As the holiday season beckons, only uncertainty is certain. It’s going to look a lot different from other seasons. Holiday feasts via Zoom? COVID-themed ornaments on the tree? Visits with Santa via smartphones and tablets?

There’s even a new spin for those used to travelling at this time of year. In some countries, flights to nowhere have become popular. According to the New York Times, “People who miss flying are rushing to buy tickets for flights that land in the same place they depart from.” And Air New Zealand is offering “Mystery Breaks,” where travellers pay a flat fee to book an entire vacation package and don’t find out their destination until two days before they leave.

However, luckily for holiday consumers, shopping, which took a strange turn during last spring’s lockdown, has sorted itself out. From crazy purchases to stalled deliveries, early pandemic shopping was fraught with problems.

My first COVID-times shopping experience took place on March 11, when I took a hysterical call from my daughter in the pandemic-epicentre of New York City. Here in Canada, we were still a few days away from lockdown, although people were rushing to buy toilet paper. My daughter was entering the disinfect-groceries-and-sanitize-everything phase and there was not a bottle of hand sanitizer left in New York (or in BC). Even Amazon was out of it, she panicked. Well, I said calmly, I live in Canada—and, sure enough, amazon.ca had lots of hand sanitizer. I spent $75 on 12 little bottles and promised to mail them to her as soon as they arrived. Problem solved!

However. That was March and when they still hadn’t arrived in June, I requested and received a refund and, like everyone else by then, happily continued washing my hands with soap and water. But mid-August? Surprise! A package arrived from China filled with 12 little bottles of a gooey something. Thankfully the sanitizer craze had passed—no need to send them to New York—and just as well because I’m really not sure what is in those bottles.

Mask-wearing started out slowly, but it was apparent even in the early part of lockdown that they would become essential. At this point, there weren’t a lot of options, but I found some heavy-duty masks on Instagram. They were bit pricey, but a portion of proceeds was being donated to a good cause, and so, on April 21, I ordered two. Once again, June rolled around, and no masks. Tracking showed they were coming from China (something the small print hadn’t mentioned), but they hadn’t moved in weeks. A couple of email refund requests went unanswered, the website went down and angry comments flourished on the Instagram page. By this time, I’d purchased several BC-made masks (good lesson, here) and resigned myself to the loss. But wait! Just a short time after the sanitizer arrived, so too did the masks.

I think this scenario must have played out all over the world. Bruce similarly ordered some iPhone accessories—suddenly important for all that FaceTiming and Zooming—and they also eventually arrived months later.

Shopping these days has definitely evolved, and so despite the many questions around how the next few months will unfold, one question can be answered definitively: if you’re in gift-buying mode, shop local. Whether it’s in person or online, support local businesses.

That’s the answer to “where to buy.” The answer to “what to buy” is less clear—imagine last holiday season if we’d known that toilet paper, hand sanitizer, masks and iPhone accessories were the gifts we coveted?

This edition of Boulevard offers idea for locally made gifts, tips for tradition-rich cuisine and recommendations for cosying up your kitchen. We may not be able to add any certainty to an uncertain season, but we can at least add some comfort, flavour and festivity—and let’s just forget the hand sanitizer from China.

Susan Lundy Editor