EDMONTON -- With many provinces under lockdown or facing gathering restrictions amid a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadians were forced to find creative ways to include family and friends in their Christmas celebrations.
For several weeks, officials across the country have urged Canadians to reconsider get-together plans for the holiday season as infections surged nationally from a seven-day average of about 3,000 cases on Nov. 1 to more than 6,000 on Dec. 2, separating Canadians across provincial and regional borders.
With an avoid all non-essential travel advisory still in place for international destinations, most people are also separated from family abroad.
But that didn鈥檛 stop folks from gathering on Zoom calls, where dozens of extended family members exchanged holiday wishes. Some even fashioned cardboard cutouts of their missing family members to include them in Christmas morning traditions.
Despite rising case numbers, a recent poll found that about one-third of Canadians still planned to visit friends and family for the holidays.
The survey, taken late last month by Angus Reid in partnership with research firm Cardus, found that 30 per cent of the nearly 5,000 respondents said they would visit loved ones locally and 10 per cent said they planned to leave their community or province to do so.
For those who followed the advice of officials, isolating at home with their immediate household, Christmas looked much different than years past.
鈥淛ust the two of us for Christmas dinner,鈥 read one tweet. 鈥淚t did make dinner very quiet but @lesleyanneb6 made sure the Christmas Crafts from our Grandchildren made it to the table.
