Happy New Year to All We Have Easy for the Pandemic Period!
CONSUMER CONCERNS
Kaieteur News – Over the years, it has been a practice in this column to wish consumers and all readers a “Happy and Prosperous New Year” and this was done in the spirit of “Auld Lang Syne.”
This year, despite a world radically changed by the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are persevering to carry on the traditions of the New Year we have always known but at the same time be aware of the different worlds created by the pandemic .
At parties when dancers dance the New Year to the New and when the noise makers and squibs switch off at midnight to drive away evil and the evil spirits of the New Year and when the strains of “Auld Lang Syne ”and clinking wine glasses to toast the New Year’s echo in the night sky, these COVID-19 regulations prohibited these New Year exposures involving close-up crowds of people.
And yet, welcoming efforts were being made to keep the spirit of traditional New Year celebrations alive with videos and other electronic devices.
The public fireworks displays that attracted thousands of spectators did not happen although the GDF still sent their huge and colorful fireworks into the air for people in their homes to see and enjoy.
Many churches had virtual services and now churchmen realized they could worship in their homes. The traditional New Year concerts given by the militia and police bands in the Botanic Gardens and the sea walls were not physically attended but were broadcast on radio and television.
A lot of holiday shopping happened online and friends and family New Year visits didn’t happen as much, as the pandemic consultations discourage people from doing so.
Yet there were traditional family lunches and dinners and the print media and television carried ads with the traditional New Year’s motifs, such as the hands of the Grandfather Clock moving from midnight or Father’s time with his scythe clearing the remnants of the Old Year, making room for the New Year.
People have managed to maintain the spirit of the traditional New Year in 2020 although the pandemic regulations have banned so much of the festival’s physical activities and some are still optimistic that the New Year would to become celebrated in the traditional way once the pandemic subsided.
Others have realistically understood that the pandemic changed the world forever and that the New Year as we know it would no longer be celebrated in a pre-pandemic style in the future.
For one, the use of Information Technology (IT) has been greatly strengthened and extended to the point where international meetings are now being held through Zoom.
Significant communication is maintained between groups and individuals using social media.
This increasing use of IT has begun to affect life in multifaceted ways:
Online shopping has grown exponentially and housewives who used to consider shopping in downtown stores a joy of life are now turning to Amazon and other online suppliers. Medical treatment is starting to use IT and education has become very dependent on it and now there is less use of the classroom; this is especially true in tertiary education.
Books are increasingly being delivered electronically and bookstores are cutting back on their stocks of hard copies. IT has been infiltrating and changing social relations and habits and having house parties or friends calling each other for tea or drink is becoming less fashionable.
Despite the apparent reduction in direct human contact the pandemic has brought to social life, people have begun to show increased concern for the health and well-being of their neighbors and food gifts are given to the less fortunate and people have become generally more useful to one another, especially to the less able.
In the post-pandemic world, New Year’s customs and celebrations as we know them will be transformed.
In whatever new form the transformation of the New Year celebrations takes, they would always produce hope, joy, brotherhood, concern for our fellow man, and the cathartic feeling of entering the freshness of new life since the New Year is almost a ritual. of passage, and like a Ticket Rite, he will always retain his joy and optimism.
The metamorphosis will be addressed in 2021 and will develop further over the years, but always retains its existing qualities and may even be enriching those qualities in ways that were no longer envisaged.