If you lived through December 2020, you remember the specific absurdity of trying to teach your 78-year-old grandmother how to unmute herself on Zoom.
“Grandma, click the microphone.”
“What microphone?”
“The little picture of a microphone. On the bottom of the screen.”
“I don’t see a screen. I see you.”
“That IS the screen.”
This went on in millions of households. Simultaneously. Like a nationwide tech support nightmare sponsored by Pfizer and anxiety.
I film families for a living. Over 700 of them. And Christmas 2020 was the strangest holiday season I’ve ever witnessed in this line of work. Families who normally packed 30 people into a living room were instead staring at a grid of tiny rectangles, trying to recreate the warmth of being together through a webcam and an internet connection that kept buffering at the worst possible moments.
It didn’t work. Not really. But people tried so hard, and that’s the part I want to remember.
I talked to a family who set up a Zoom call with 22 relatives on Christmas morning. They opened presents “together.” The kids held up their gifts to the camera. Grandpa wore the same Santa hat he’d worn every Christmas since 1987. Grandma cried, but she cried every Christmas anyway, so at least that part was consistent.
Was it the same? Of course not. You can’t hug a screen. You can’t smell your grandmother’s kitchen through a laptop speaker. You can’t sneak into the pantry for a second slice of pie when nobody’s looking if nobody’s actually there.
But something happened in that weird year that I think matters. An entire generation of grandparents learned to use video technology. Some of them kicking and screaming. Some of them surprisingly fast (my money is always on the grandmothers). And families who had never recorded a single conversation suddenly had hours of Zoom footage. Messy, pixelated, poorly lit, beautiful footage of real people trying to stay connected through the strangest year of their lives.
That footage is a time capsule. If you recorded Zoom calls with your family in 2020, don’t delete them. Don’t let them sit in some forgotten folder. That’s history. Your family’s history. The year everything changed and you figured out how to show up for each other anyway.
Someday your grandkids will watch those recordings and see what their family did when the world shut down. That’s a story worth keeping.
If you want to turn your family’s story into something more lasting than a Zoom recording, Heritage Films makes legacy documentary films. We’ve been capturing family stories long before the pandemic, and we’ll be here long after. yourheritagefilm.com