EDITORIAL: Thankful for so much normalcy

Published 6:22 am Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Normal. A simple word, and one that’s easy to take for granted. At least until very little seems normal.

For more than two years, the concept of normal at times might have felt, to many of us, like a fondly remembered figment from the past.

A worldwide pandemic can have that effect.

COVID-19 arrived rather suddenly.

In the span of a couple weeks, schools and many businesses, all of which had been operating normally — there’s that word — closed or were severely curtailed.

Our lives were dramatically altered.

The return to normal — there it is again — has been a more gradual process. So gradual, perhaps, that we didn’t recognize it as acutely as we did the upheaval that made the spring of 2020 unique.

This week, which brings the holiday when we traditionally consider what we are thankful for, gives us a fine chance to reflect on, and celebrate, how much that once was strange no longer is.

Which is to say, normal.

We’ve not banished the virus, of course.

It remains a threat to our older friends and family, and those with certain medical conditions.

But the combination of vaccines and past infections and better treatments has rendered COVID-19 a notably lesser threat that it was.

As a result, this holiday season will be much more like what we were accustomed to before most of us had heard of a coronavirus.

Indeed, the past several months have been marked by much that is, well, normal.

For the first time since 2019, a school year started in the usual way, with fully in-person classes, and no mask mandates.

Sports and other activities took place on the regular schedule, a vital part of the high school experience for students, and an important connection between the schools and the communities.

Most summer festivals and other events happened, and that trend will continue with Thanksgiving dinners and, next Saturday, Dec. 3, the Twilight Christmas parade and tree-lighting ceremony.

There is of course so much else to be thankful for, both in the community and in our own lives.

But this year, perhaps more than any other in recent memory, we can, in addition to everything else we cherish, relish the return of all that once again is normal.