So, time to finally flesh this out.
OUR NORMAL CHRISTMAS DAY GATHERING
This would be at my wife's aunt's house (her mother's sister). Her mom has two siblings. The eldest of the three has a huge house and hosts a big gathering in Winston-Salem (25 minutes from us) for all three and their spouses/kids/kids' spouses/grandkids. If everyone attends, it's 33 people, coming from Greensboro, Raleigh, NYC, Florida, and Atlanta. That gathering isn't happening on as grand of a scale this year, which for devilish reasons does sadden me. My wife and I would have opted out, but the thought of my father-in-law--a retired physician who posts on FB pretty much daily ranting about the CDC and state health department's COVID guidelines--coming face-to-face with the spouse of one my wife's cousins--who is, um, a high-ranking epidemiologist with the state health department and who went there from..you guessed it...the CDC.
That would've been kinda fun to picture. Anyway, I digress from the main point...
OUR PLAN FOR THIS YEAR
Because of the quoted information above, we're in the position of being pretty much forced to host. My father-in-law is 82, but was still working as an integrative pediatric physician (part-time) up until the weekend in mid-March when everything went crazy. He was planning to retire in May-ish, but my mother-in-law talked him into staying home on Monday, March 16th, and that was that. Since then--according to many, many, many FB posts he has made--he has dedicated over 400 hours to the study of Coronavirus and the medical response. Quite honestly, I think it's significantly more than that. They're in a retirement community and under heavy restrictions. They have a golf course in the community but he doesn't play. He exercises daily (recently was aghast when forced to wear a mask at the workout center and provided all sorts of charts and graphs and studies to the staff to explain why mask-wearing is bad) and is in outstanding physical health. Point being, the guy has nothing to do but exercise, watch Fox News (and lately move on from them as they've gotten to be too liberal,) study COVID-19, and post on FB about COVID-19. I just checked by pasting into Word so as not to exaggerate: in the last 30 days, he has 5 posts of over 1500 words (including one over 5,000 words,) all about COVID-19. He has 9 posts this month (in 7 days) about COVID.
Suffice it to say that if he had full freedom of movement, it seems like a virtual certainty that he would have had COVID by now, (but no worry, he has managed to stockpile a bunch of medications including HCQ, so he'd be fine!) but he and his wife are very much restricted by their retirement community, so they're not really a big risk to anyone else. The wild cards are my brother-in-law and his wife. They're coming up from Florida (few restrictions,) and they're a doctor and a nurse who believe it's serious, but I would describe them as loyal conservatives first, medical professionals second. In other words, they can't bring themselves to
appear liberal. They eat out at restaurants, don't wear masks unless absolutely required, etc. My strong suspicion is that they'll play it quite safe the next two weeks before they arrive out of safety for the elderly parents, but I can't guarantee that. In the interest of maintaining the relationships, we're planning to go through with having them all here for 4 days. I'm more concerned for my mother-in-law (age 72) than anyone else in the equation. She's had a number of health issues, including asthma, and I've always basically thought that despite being 10 years older, my father-in-law is likely to outlive her.
The extended weather forecast isn't cooperating either. We recently had a Christmas here where I was outside in shorts and barefoot watching my daughters ride their new bikes, but it's trending quite chilly, so it looks like there's a good chance all nine of us will be mostly cooped up in the house for the better part of the visit. Ugh.