A Very Merry Christmas to all, and moderate expectations for the New Year

I know what you're thinking: Merry Christmas? Now? Christmas Eve was a week ago. Once again Leyhane comes in late and lame.

Which may be true -- but it's still Christmas. Did your true love give you seven swans a-swimming today? This is the Seventh Day of Christmas. The Shepherds are back with their flocks, perhaps, but the Three Kings are still following the Star. By now, perhaps, they've stopped off at Herod's palace to ask for directions, but they haven't yet found the place where the Child was.

Come to think of it, this story may provide a good explanation for why men (allegedly) have been reluctant to stop and ask for directions, even prior to the invention of Google Maps: Look at the terrible things that happened when the Wise Men innocently asked for directions to Bethlehem. No responsible person would want to ask for directions after that, right?

The Twelve Days of Christmas will continue into next week. The Wise Men will finally get to deliver their gifts on January 6th, the Feast of Epiphany. And, yet, many of my neighbors, and I'll bet some of yours, too, have already taken down their Christmas decorations. I understand that this year, in particular, many are in a hurry to be done with Christmas. Because after Christmas comes New Year. And with the New Year 2020 will be but a nightmarish memory.

Match.com is running some clever ads that, I think, catch the national mood toward the year now ending -- in them, Satan meets his soulmate, 2020. In the picture above, the happy couple are having a picnic in an empty stadium -- emptied, we automatically realize, on account of COVID-19.

Since last Sunday, Brewster Rockit has been taking a not-so-fond look back at 2020. In a subsequent strip, one of the characters suggests that "its like 2020 was run by a super villian." A lot of people, I think, take that view.

And we certainly hope 2021 will be better.

But the 'Rona won't vanish with the last stroke of midnight tonight. Our ongoing two-week shutdown, now in its 10th month, will continue into an 11th and beyond.

Many people are thinking things will improve dramatically after January 20. "My new favorite palindrome - 12021" was making the rounds on Facebook a week or so ago. Things should be a little less crazy in Washington---I hope---on January 21. At least the early monrning Tweets from the White House will presumably cease.

But things are going to be rough for a lot of us for a long time to come. I don't know if the Loop will ever come back to anything like what it was: Business owners have seen for themselves that a lot of people can work from home. Why pay rent on offices in downtown skyscrapers? Leases will expire and not be renewed. Offices that must remain will downsize. And what will become of the buildings themselves? These were the golden geese of our property tax system. Their owners won't be making as much money; the buildings will not be generating vital tax revenue. And what about the conventions and trade shows that provided so much tax revenue. All of these associations have learned how to do virtual events now -- will they want to resume actual events, once public health authorities permit? City and County revenues are going to be woeful for the foreseeable future.

When will the courts fully reopen? How? Every sort of business owner is asking questions like this. Local authorities haven't received as much vaccine as was promised -- and have pushed out only a small fraction of what they have received. The pace will quicken. But, even so, it will be months, at best, before most of us will be vaccinated.

And when we are all vaccinated, will there be restaurants to visit? Will any movie theaters survive? Will live theater return? The White Sox should be competitive -- but will people be able to afford tickets?

The economic numbers aren't so bleak because, while so many were suffering, Amazon and Wal-Mart and Zoom and a lot of the tech sector thrived. The very rich got richer. But a lot of jobs aren't coming back. Not in 2021. Probably not ever.

So Happy New Year to all -- but don't get your hopes up that 2021 will be a great improvement over what we're living with now. Not right away. Maybe at some point. Whoopee!