A lot has changed since 2020’s holiday season.

Gone are the days of pandemic pods, pre-holiday COVID-19 testing lines snaking around D.C. streets, and travel-related quarantine protocols. Now, at-home tests make pre-gathering screening easy. More than 60% of D.C.’s total population is fully vaccinated, young children are eligible for a shot, and boosters are becoming widely available. For many people, the upcoming Thanksgiving and winter holidays are expected to look at least a bit more normal, after nearly two years of life in a pandemic.

But for locals with unvaccinated family and friends, pandemic anxiety is still hanging over the season — one that for some, may already be fraught with familial tension.

“It’s less about the safety and more about, ‘is this the kind of person I want in my life?’” says Donald, a Ward 7 resident who asked to be identified only by his first name in order to speak openly about his family. His father, in his sixties, is supposed to visit Donald’s unvaccinated sister in Florida this January, after spending Thanksgiving and Christmas with Donald in D.C.

Donald’s dad is vaccinated, but has health conditions that could put him at an increased risk of falling seriously ill if he were to endure a breakthrough case. “Am I really worried about my father’s safety? Or am I just super fucking disappointed that somebody who grew up in the same family as I did, with all the privileges I did, is choosing to be a clown?”

For Donald, who is fully vaccinated, approaching the vaccine-status conversation with both his father and his sister has been difficult — so much so, that he’s avoided doing it. Donald’s mother passed away years ago, and he feels it’s important for his dad to connect with his children over the holidays. But he already has a “strained” relationship with his sister, adding stress to the situation. He’s still trying to figure out how to talk to her and his father about the trip.

“I don’t know how to have the conversation with my father about what he needs to do to stay safe,” Donald says. “I think for my dad, there’s like a pressure to kind of keep things together. I don’t quite feel that pressure.”

Donald is one of several locals making tough calls about who can gather together this holiday season. Top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said last week that vaccinated individuals with vaccinated loved ones can “feel good,” about engaging in the typical holiday traditions this year. But that optimistic outlook dims when unvaccinated people are added into the equation, or if gathering involves traveling to areas where vaccine uptake is low. And while children ages 5-11 are now eligible for a vaccine, they won’t be fully protected by Thanksgiving.

For David S., a Petworth resident who declined to provide his last name to protect his family’s privacy, unvaccinated family members have thrown a wrench into a normally drama-free Christmas tradition. Every year, his side of the family gathers for a Christmas Eve brunch. This December, his vaccinated sister in western Maryland is hosting the brunch, and has decided to set a rule: vaccinated guests only. This is especially important for David, his wife, and their unvaccinated 2-year-old.

“That was obviously, as you can imagine, very controversial,” David says. “I’m not telling these family members that I’ll never see you if you don’t get vaccinated, right? And I’m not telling them, ‘you need to get vaccinated.’ I’m just saying, if you choose not to do this thing, which is completely safe, which you would be doing both for yourself and to protect the most vulnerable among us, there are going to be consequences that naturally attend to that…one of those is, I’m not going to let my unvaccinated kid hang out with you indoors.”

Neil Sehgal, a professor of public health at University of Maryland, says he wouldn’t attend or host a gathering with an unvaccinated adult, but he would attend a gathering with an unvaccinated child, so long as everyone else is fully inoculated and there are precautions in place, like open windows or even eating outside.

“I would certainly be hesitant to share an indoor meal with an unmasked, unvaccinated adult right now,” Sehgal says. “The principal reason being, it’s not like transmission is low in our communities. Things are a lot better than they were last year, but it’s not low.”

D.C.’s current daily case rate per 100,000 residents is 12.8, as of Nov. 22. The city categorizes this as “moderate” community transmission. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which uses a different metric to measure transmission, shows the city has “substantial” spread.) While it’s a sizable decrease from the case loads reported during the peak of delta’s surge this September, it’s well above the all-time lows recorded in the summer, when the city saw sustained minimal spread from late May to mid-July.

Sehgal also expects to see a case increase, (albeit not to the magnitude of last year’s surge), following the holiday season, but one that — thanks to vaccinations — likely will not result in a similarly high increase in deaths or hospitalizations.

“Ignoring COVID won’t make it go away, but in our current trajectory, it’s probably not going to go away on its own either,” Sehgal says. “And so I think we have to make some decisions about our individual risk tolerance, and the risk that we pose to other people in the decisions that we make around holiday travel.”

David isn’t particularly worried about his unvaccinated son getting seriously sick from COVID-19, but he doesn’t want to expose his son unnecessarily if he can avoid it. Given the “relatively COVID-free life” he lives in D.C. (where he says nearly every social invitation he gets requires vaccination), staying away from unvaccinated family members is the smartest choice.

“It just doesn’t seem like a worthwhile risk.” David says. “And if I knew that I could have done something very easy to prevent him from getting COVID, and if he happened to be one of those super rare exceptions where it was really bad for him, I couldn’t live with myself afterwards.”

In David’s situation, the unvaccinated family members prompting the vaccine-only rule aren’t in his immediate family. But for John, a Southwest D.C. resident who is immunocompromised, vaccines have put a wedge between his mother and him as the holidays approach. (DCist/WAMU is using John’s first name so he can speak openly about his family’s vaccination statuses).

John will spend Thanksgiving in D.C. with his partner, just like they did last year. But come Christmas, he has plans to attend a wedding in Florida, where he’ll see his mom for the first time in two years. Because his mom’s fiancé is unvaccinated, John plans to distance himself from the couple during the trip.

“I said [to her], ‘listen, if he’s not vaccinated, I’m not going to be able to do indoor dining, you know, gathering without a mask…just trying to stay safe in those more confined environments,” John says. “And that kind of blew up into a whole thing, which I thought was a reasonable ask just for my safety.”

He says his mom isn’t talking to him because of his decision, although his siblings, who will also be attending, support his decision.

“It’s very surprising, because I am immunocompromised, and she’s always been like, overly motherly and super worried about me all the time,” John says. “And then this, in my opinion, minor issue…for this very specific thing, is completely ignored and kind of glossed over.”

Not every vaccine conversation has been difficult — or even explicit — though. Caroline, an Arlington resident, has a mother-in-law in the area who she says is extremely hesitant about the vaccine and fearful of potential reactions. The mother-in-law will not join Caroline, her partner, and their 2-year-old son for Thanksgiving, a plan that both parties seemingly understood silently.

“I don’t think either of us explicitly said, ‘we’re not seeing you because you’re not vaccinated.’ But, you know, it has been a topic of conversation, she very much knows that we would prefer for her to get the vaccine. When she comes to our house, she wears a mask, which you wouldn’t ask anyone [vaccinated] to do,” Caroline says. “I think she saw the writing on the wall, and just kind of volunteered that she wasn’t going to be [in town].”

As Caroline sees it, it’s not just about protecting her unvaccinated son from infection, but also her mother-in-law — a school teacher who works in-person, and is in her 60s. (Caroline declined to give her last name to protect her mother-in-law’s job privacy.)

“I just also have concerns about her health. I work in a healthcare setting where, at the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of people got sick. A lot of people died,” Caroline says. “I would hate to bring something home and not only get my toddler sick, but also her.”