Holiday spirit manages to shine through for some as Omicron dashes Canadians’ celebrations
Global News
Public health experts have spent recent weeks urging people to keep their gatherings small and intimate as COVID-19 cases spiked across the country.
Fewer Canadians gathered around twinkling Christmas trees to tear open presents with friends and family Saturday as COVID-19 put a damper on festivities for a second straight year, but the holiday spirit still managed to shine through for many.
Public health experts have spent recent weeks urging people to keep their gatherings small and intimate — if they were to go ahead at all — as COVID-19 cases spiked across the country due to the fasts-spreading Omicron variant.
Still, dozens attended a scaled-back noon-hour mass at St. Michael’s Cathedral Basilica in downtown Toronto, where churchgoers wore masks and stood two metres apart.
Bernadette Alexander, who attended with a friend, said the service was particularly moving because she had been worshipping from home for so long.
“We were just saying it’s been almost two years. We’ve been watching mass on TV, but this is the first time we’ve been to mass in person in two years,” Alexander said.
“It was amazing. It was beautiful. It reduced me to tears, actually.”
Froila Fernandes, an international student from India who moved to Canada two months ago, attended the service on her own _ her first in this country.
“I found this service so spiritually enriching for me today because it felt like that was something I was lacking over here ever since I moved,” she said.
