I am so glad and grateful that Beforetimes Swistle was the kind of person who couldn’t resist buying that cute box of Christmas cards or that cute roll of wrapping paper even when technically she already had more cards and paper than she needed, because that means Pandemic Swistle did not have to go out to buy either cards or paper. I am down to the scraps of wrapping paper, but frankly probably still have enough cards for another whole year.

Thank you for all your input on gifts for medical staff—even, unexpectedly, thank you to the people who ignored the pretty specific instruction to NOT tell us what gets thrown in the trash: in normal times, I don’t want to hear that a team tosses all homemade food because they’re assuming their patients live in disgusting squalor or whatever, but IN A PANDEMIC it turns out I DO want to hear that some medical establishments have PANDEMIC rules that mean they are required to throw away food. (And the TONE of those two types of comments is so different that the making of the latter type of comment doesn’t feel like it breaks the rule against the making of the former type, and it is so pleasing to have a comments section intuitive enough to instinctively understand that.) I absolutely don’t want to spend eighty benevolent dollars on Kringles just to have the Kringles literally thrown away, and was glad to feel saved from making that potential disheartening mistake.

But…is there no better way to handle this, considering we are NOT seeing any evidence that the virus spreads by two people each taking a slice of danish an hour apart? IS that really different than two people picking up a snack-size bag of cookies an hour apart? Wouldn’t “standing around a basket of individually-wrapped items” be exactly the same as “standing around a plate of cookies,” and wouldn’t we just avoid both of those standing-around situations? And aren’t we talking about trained medical professionals who know not to touch and breathe on every portion before selecting one? Must we really THROW AWAY perfectly safe and edible food? “No one gets anything and the food is thrown into the trash” doesn’t seem like the FIRST AND ONLY solution that should occur to us. I don’t have any sort of medical degree, but I can think of two possibilities:

1. Have one trusted staff person designated to carefully wash hands and wear gloves and then divide up brought-in communal food into baggies or onto plates or whatever, so that it is now individually-portioned.

2. If for some reason that can’t work (I can’t think of any reason that can’t work), AT THE BARE MINIMUM an entire food item could be sent home with one person, and then the next entire food item could be sent home with another person. It could be done by drawing names out of a hat, and could be considered a Fun Pandemic Holiday Raffle.

Anyway. That’s kind of a lot of attitude in those paragraphs, considering how much fun I had choosing individually-portioned things, and how happy I was with what I chose:

I started with a base of individual coffee drinks: four 4-packs of canned Starbucks drinks, one pack of each flavor available: espresso & cream, espresso & cream light, black, and mocha. I considered the 4-packs of glass-bottled Starbucks drinks, which I find very satisfying (they come in more treat-like flavors than the canned drinks, and I use the empty bottles as small vases), but I felt uneasy about transporting breakable stuff / bringing glass into a hospital, so I just went with the cans.

Having four packs of drinks made me feel inclined to choose four packs of snacks. I went for a variety of types: salty Gardetto’s / Chex Mix / Bugles mix, sweet Pepperidge Farm cookie packets, sweet fudge-dipped mini Oreo packets, and hearty Caramel Cashew trail mix packets. I was fairly limited by what was available for curbside pick-up, but that kept me from getting bogged down in choices. I placed the order, went and picked it up, and brought it with us to the appointment. It all fit in two of the handled paper bags the curbside grocery store has been using, so I could write “Happy Holidays to Pediatric GI from the Thistles!” on both in Sharpie marker. I gave the bags to one of the nurses, figuring (1) she knows where food for the whole department is supposed to go, and (2) if for some reason the food CAN’T be shared department-wide, the nurses are the people we spend the most time with and have gotten to know the best, so I’d most want them to have it.

It turned out that our hospital doesn’t have a policy about non-individually-packaged food: I heard the nurses discussing an apparently impressive cookie plate a co-worker had brought in. But since they were also talking about how they were going to get through everything before it went bad, I was still very glad I’d brought individually-packaged, shelf-stable stuff: it can easily be set aside for a time of fewer cookie plates. It’s the kind of idea I may want to continue to use after the pandemic—especially since it really was fun to CHOOSE things.