I’ve been thinking about the Big Apple Circus lately. Every year around this time, my parents would take their grandchildren to see it. On the given day, we would rush into the city with our children, bundled up in their hats, coats and scarves, and hand them off outside a tent at Lincoln Center.

My husband and I, and some years my siblings, too, would get a drink and dinner at a packed restaurant nearby, enjoying the crowds and the wine and the delightful break from parenthood.

This was not an event circled in red on the calendar. Some years, I’d almost forget about it until my mother called to ask if she should get tickets again. But with the circus canceled this year along with pretty much everything else, I’ve been thinking about how much I enjoyed the ritual. The spirit of that evening was part of a mosaic that made for a giddy, frenetic season that will be a shadow of its usual self this year.

For weeks, Americans agonized over how we would make the most of a dialed down Thanksgiving, one that would not threaten the health of our loved ones. But as the holiday season kicks into full gear, we’re left counting the other markers that have been altered or erased. The dinner parties with friends. The crowded holiday markets. The school recitals and holiday concerts. Even the dreaded office holiday party.

With so many events canceled or moved online, a solid month of revelry has been replaced with just more days spent at home. Even the lazier traditions of the season, the days spent lounging around the house in new pajamas, will feel like an underwhelming way to cap a year that has been spent largely in PJs. Roughly half of the respondents to a recent HuffPost/YouGov survey said their holiday plans had been affected by the pandemic, and a majority said they expected the season to be less fun than normal.

In what seems like an effort to make our overused living rooms feel fresh again, Christmas decorations have gone up early this year. On Nov. 1, the actress January Jones showed up on Instagram wearing red sweatpants and holding a toy Santa in front of a mantle strung with stockings. A few days before Thanksgiving, the model Gigi Hadid delivered to her to her 61 million Instagram followers photos of her new baby and her decorated Christmas tree. And Amanda Kloots, whose husband, the Broadway actor Nick Cordero, died of Covid-19 in July, posted a picture of the tree she decorated with her brother in early November. In the caption, she wrote, “I hung every sentimental ornament and all our stockings. Some of it doesn’t make any sense at all, but it’s OK.”

As we settle into a December with a social calendar nearly as barren as it was in April, the quietness of the days ahead feels heavy. “This is perhaps an unprecedented time in the history of humanity,” not because it’s the first time humans have experienced a pandemic, but because it’s the first time we’ve responded to one this way, said Dimitris Xygalatas, an associate professor of anthropology and psychology at the University of Connecticut.

“We are essentially programmed by our evolution to have these ceremonies,” he said. “We use them to mark time and we use them to celebrate the most important accomplishments of our life. So not being able to have them for the first time has shifted our sense of time, and has created this feeling of emptiness.”

A few weeks before Thanksgiving, Lili Knutzen, 51, a clinical psychologist in Montclair, N.J., decided she wanted to find a way to replace the long list of events that weren’t happening. In a typical year, Ms. Knutzen would take her daughters, ages 10 and 14, to a Broadway show or to Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Then they’d go to Rockefeller Center to see the Christmas tree lighting and watch the ice skaters.

“These are things that I did as a kid that really lit up the whole Christmas season,” said Ms. Knutzen, who grew up in Brooklyn. “So when I had my own children, I was so excited to share all of these festivities with them. New York made the holidays magical.”

Rather than write this year off, Ms. Knutzen spent most of November looking for alternatives. She got tickets to Glow, an outdoor light show at the New York Botanical Garden, and to another light show at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Penn.

In an effort to liven up her home, Ms. Knutzen invited a few of her daughters’ friends to the house for a virtual Alvin Ailey performance. She also approached her neighbors about organizing an event she described as a month of light. Each night in December, a family on the block will decorate one window in their house and leave out treats for the local children. For her family’s night, Ms. Knutzen plans to decorate her window with a candy-cane theme and leave a candy-cane forest on the front lawn so the children can collect treats.

“This is a different year and it’s not going to be like this every year,” she said. “We just have to be creative and make the most of it.”

In a year like this one, it’s the smaller rituals that may actually be the ones worth salvaging. After all, tickets to a show or dinner with good friends were the fun, low-pressure activities that often took the edge off the charged family gathering, or distracted you from what can be a bittersweet season.

“These second-tier rituals bring some lightness and some entertainment and diversion to a time of the year that, even under the best of circumstances, we can feel a little down in the dumps,” said Anne Fishel, the director and co-founder of the Family Dinner Project at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor of psychology at the Harvard Medical School. The holiday season normally “jazzes up a time of the year that is pretty cold and dark in a lot of the parts of the country.”

Create new mini-rituals, ones focused on breaking up the monotony of the days, and perhaps the month will feel a little more celebratory. Declare a family movie night with popcorn and treats. Invite friends to stand outside with a cup of hot cocoa when you turn on the lights outside your house, or invite them on a nighttime stroll to see the lights at other homes. If school recitals have been canceled, dance or play music in the yard.

Dr. Xygalatas, at the University of Connecticut, pointed out that all traditions have to start somewhere. Longstanding ones can change from one year to the next, even if no one wants to admit it.

“This isn’t new that people are creating new traditions — it’s always happened and they always go through a process of cultural selection,” he said. “I predict that a lot of families will invent new traditions this year that will stay with them.”

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