Yup, in completely unsurprising news the Holiday Stroll for 2020 has been officially canceled. It was, right up until last week, the one event that I was hell-bent on making happen, after literally every single other event of this year got canceled. If it came down to it, I was willing to make a day-trip to Boston and taking a quick walk outside Mass General on Kira’s lunch break. Alas, COVID has made all of it impossible. [See also a New York City weekend at the Plaza Hotel and a performance of ‘Plaza Suite’, a Betty Buckley show at Cafe Carlysle, a Broadway Mother’s Day trip to see ‘Six’, ‘Jagged Little Pill’, ‘The Inheritance, Parts 1 & 2‘ and ‘The Minutes’, a Boston Bro-Sox weekend at the Mandarin Oriental, a 10th anniversary wedding celebration in Boston, and a 20th anniversary summer party.]
My disappointment for missing the Holiday Stroll is actually a welcome surprise – I honestly thought I had given up completely on feeling a normal emotion like disappointment again after numbing myself to such calamities after almost a year of let-downs. Maybe that’s the glimmer of hope in an unlikely disguise, so I’ll take it.
Sadly, that means I will miss out on seeing Kira for the remainder of the year – I haven’t seen her since January or February – a sorrowful aspect of this COVID crisis, and we will have to make do with a linky look back at previous Holiday Strolls, much in the way we recalled Broadway traditions with Mom and Red Sox Adventures with Skip.
As far as annual events go, the Holiday Stroll is one of the longer-running ones – and as best as I can trace, it started in 2011, right after Kira and I were reunited from a decade of being apart. But I won’t bore you with what has already been written on the subject. Here, then, is the list of links to bring you to some previous Holiday Strolls:
HOLIDAY STROLL 2012
Holiday Stroll 2013 ~ Part 1, Part 2
Holiday Stroll 2014
Holiday Stroll 2015 ~ Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Holiday Stroll 2016
Holiday Stroll 2017
Holiday Stroll 2018 ~ Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Holiday Stroll 2019 ~ Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Recap
