“Is every kid in America sick this week?” – post by Twitter/X account @jimmygards

 Y’all know my routine for this column by now.

I try to start it with a quote by someone with at least a pinch of historical or modern distinction. Today’s quote comes from a random post by a Twitter/X user that I showed to my wife a few days ago.

It seemed more appropriate than anything else I could find.

As a third-grade teacher, my wife was living through this quote more than most of us – at least those working outside of healthcare, childcare or primary and secondary education.

We managed to avoid a sick kid for a while, but the bug eventually found its way into our house and the houses of many friends and relatives both locally and states away.

The visions of sugar plums dancing in our heads this time of year have been replaced by words like amoxicillin, subclade K and copays. I prefer the sugar plums. Luckily, my household was feeling fine by the time we welcomed in Santa Claus.

But I do worry the earlier-than-usual flu season may have placed a damper on the festivities for a lot of people, and that is a shame because of how special this time of year is.

Thankfully, I was able to get a dose of perspective a couple of weeks ago. Part of my job responsibilities include occasionally teaching some online professional-development classes for election officials across the country.

The course I was leading involved some discussion of the difficulties presented by both the 1918 Spanish flu and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

I have to admit I missed the 1918 pandemic, but the 2020 one is still quite vivid, though some events of that year almost seem like a fever dream now. At least this flu ain’t the coronavirus.

You may remember there was quite a bit of consternation that year around cancelled or heavily altered Christmas events both religious and secular. Families even struggled with deciding whether or not to have a gathering and how to handle social distancing and wearing masks.

Though this flu bug seems to be a more gnarly variety than usual, I have decided that if a few scrambled Christmas plans were the biggest of my worries then I must live a charmed life.

There are so many people around the world this Christmas season who face daily questions about how they will secure the basic staples needed for survival.

That is a worry foreign to most of us, but we are not far removed from ancestors for whom that was a real danger, even those who lived in our bountiful country.

It is too bad that so many of us do not realize how great our lives are. Gallup polling in the last year shows increasing pessimism in the economy, personal finances, and political leadership.

Having those concerns are legitimate, but they can easily overwhelm our sense of personal peace.

Looking at this from another angle, perhaps the problem is many people believe this present moment is the best our lives will be for the foreseeable future.

Results from a worldwide Pew Research Center study published in January showed 57 percent of adults surveyed in 36 developed countries across the world believed their children would be worse off financially than their parents. This included 74 percent of American adults who believe this.

Upon further inspection, these statistics probably should not be surprising. Many media outlets, political leaders, and social influencers exploit the knowledge that scaring you, infuriating you, or doing both are the easiest ways to get your attention.

While we cannot escape scary headlines or the tropes that everyone who does not look like you or who does not think like you is coming to get you, we can change the way we think about our own lives.

My strategy is always to ask myself if there is anyone in the world with whom I would want to trade places. There are plenty of richer, smarter, healthier, better-looking and more-cultured people than I in this world, but they all have their own problems, and I would rather be me than any of ‘em.

My Christmas wish is that you feel the same way about your own life even if you are in the middle of a rough patch or, God-forbid, got yourself saddled with the flu this Christmas.

If I may tweak a line from Elvis here, we would rather have a flu Christmas without you than a Christmas without you here at all.