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For some in Victoria, pandemic restrictions brought a scaled-down Christmas Day, while for others it was business as usual.

Lisa Pons-Labelle’s Christmas dinner table was missing two settings for her grown children, who would normally sleep over on Christmas Eve and spend the holiday with their parents.

Her daughter, Gwen, stayed in Vancouver, and her son, Kevin, was at home just a few minutes away from his parents’ Oak Bay residence.

Pons-Labelle said while it was frustrating her son couldn’t join them for Christmas because he has a roommate, it was an easy decision to keep her celebration to just herself and her husband, Fred Pons, because the family has felt the effects of a strained health care system.

Pons had a surgery scheduled in March that was postponed for several months when the province cancelled non-urgent surgeries to prepare for a potential surge of COVID-19 patients. He had the operation a few months later.

Pons-Labelle said that wait drove home for her the importance of respecting pandemic rules to keep protect hospitals from becoming overwhelmed.

“I wouldn’t want to do anything to potentially put other people at risk of having their surgeries cancelled, even though it’s very tempting to bend the rules a bit,” she said.

The couple kept up a Christmas Eve tradition of watching Christmas Vacation together and planned to spend the afternoon chatting with their kids before enjoying a dinner for two.

Valerie Wilson and Dave Vogel would normally be part of a family gathering of 10 people, but it was just the two of them this year.

They went for a long walk in the Christmas morning drizzle to see an impressive light display at an Oak Bay house, and planned to head home for an afternoon of phone calls with Vogel’s family in Alberta.

“Thank god for social media and telephones with cameras,” Vogel said. “It woudn’t have been the same if this happened 10 years ago.”

Not everyone was feeling the effect of the pandemic.

Nguse Gebreselasie spent his second Christmas in Victoria at home with his wife and two-year-old daughter, cooking up a meal and watching a movie. A big trip home to see family in Eritrea wasn’t in the plans, regardless of the pandemic, he said.

Josh Raymundo, a student home for the holidays, went skateboarding with a friend in the morning before his mom finished her shift as a care aide in a long-term care home.

“There’s really no difference [this year],” he said of their holiday celebration.

Lynne and Peter Lighthall were also having a Christmas Day similar to previous years with champagne and coffee cake for just the two of them, but they missed the gatherings with friends and family they would normally enjoy in the lead up to Dec. 25.

Peter’s friends in the Okanagan, where the couple lived until a couple of years ago, usually host a whiskey tasting night during the holidays. This year, the event went virtual, with packages of various whiskeys delivered to all 17 people to enjoy at the same time.

“That was cool. We’ve had lots of Zoom calls,” he said.

James Patrick Perry woke up on Christmas morning warmer than he’d been during the last few weeks of cold, wet weather. Perry moved into a new tent in the parking lot at Royal Athletic Park earlier this week from Central Park, where he was one of many whose tents flooded after wet snow on Monday.

He said he was glad to be set up in a new space, with a cot to keep him and his belongings off the ground and dry, and a small community around him.

“Celebrating among all of the people here is great,” he said. “It makes a difference seeing people more often.”

regan-elliott@timescolonist.com