A Celebration in Pandemic | Arizona Documentary Family Photographer

Covid-19 has been around for a couple of months now in the US and July 4th is now here. Independence Day celebrations had always been a fun part for me and for the kids. We usually had family and friends over at our place for a party and then we will have fireworks at the end of the day. This year, with the pandemic things are definitely different. So what do we do? We don’t want to just cancel everything in life but we also cannot risk having a little too much fun for the short moment and then causing long-term damages to our healths and family relationship. It’s never an easy decision when dealing with unprecedented situations.

We decided to skip the family dinner together since most of people in our extended family do not feel comfortable dining together and mingle in a closed space and it is still too hot to have everyone eat in the backyard. We would get together for fireworks later at night while social distancing.

This is what it looks like having a firework show during a pandemic.

We set up the chairs for each small family with great social distancing in between. Everyone is wearing a mask to protect the high risk parents. And we lit up the fireworks and watched from a far.

I was trying to figure out how I feel about this whole celebration in pandemic thing. Honestly, it was a pretty unsettling eerie feeling. We were together but we couldn’t even see what the people from across the lawn are doing. Our kids and their cousin are definitely excited to see fireworks, but they couldn’t really share the joy from so far apart especially when they are also wearing protective headphones.

At one point, some neighbors set off these huge fireworks. Then everyone was just watching the big firework while ignoring our little firework.

It happened to be full moon too. In Chinese culture whenever we see a full moon we think about reunion of the family. In a sense, we were indeed together as a family, but honestly, I felt the most apart and disconnected than ever. Maybe it’s just me. I need to have either physical connection or a good quality time to fill my cup. I wonder if this is the best way to stay connected. I wonder what we could do to make sure that we can meet the needs for human connections and a sense of union.

At least I know that my kids had fun and that would be enough for now. For the long run though, we gotta figure something out so a celebration can feel a little bit more like an actual celebration.