There is a Chinese saying, from the “Writings of Worthies From Ancient Times” that a kind word warms for three winter months while harsh words wound like bitter cold in summer.

We are now on the cusp of winter in a desperate time, a time when hundreds of thousands of our countrymen have died and the coronavirus disease 2019 is killing more than 2,000 of us each day.

If we are kind to each other, we will do what public-health experts have been telling us for most of 2020: We will wear a mask and we will give up some of the many things that make living a joy — hugging one another, dancing, singing together, and more.

It is hard to give up these things. Very hard. But there are ways we can carry on with kindness.

The Schoharie Valley Singers have an announcement in our newspaper this week that explains how they put together their traditional Christmas concert in an untraditional way. Each of the singers rehearsed alone at home. Then, recordings of their voices were melded together and their concert, on YouTube, will exalt the season without endangering anyone.

Altamont Community Tradition has turned its usual Victorian Holiday celebration into a Festival of Lights. Rather than celebrating by crowding into the Masonic Hall to see decorated Christmas trees, villagers instead are making ornaments at home and hanging them on a community tree on the village green.

A Santa Car Parade on Sunday will be festive and safe as villagers admire the many decorated homes and businesses. There will still be a living Nativity outside in front of the Altamont Reformed Church where we assume the three kings and the angels hovering around the manger — because they are kind — will be wearing masks along with their halos.

Knox thought of a way kids can still safely get their wishes to Santa with a drive-through visit with the jolly old elf, and behind the Knox firehouse, evergreens are shining bright through New Year’s Day, decorated by groups throughout the Hilltowns, sponsored by the Helderberg Family and Community Organization.

“This has been a challenging year, and it is our hope that the light of the trees will bring peace and hope to the hearts of many,” wrote the organizers in a letter to the editor.

We applaud these community groups for their kindness in giving all of us ways to celebrate the season without endangering our health. Kindnesses can be individual, too. Every person who wears a mask or stays home when going out isn’t a necessity is showing kindness to others.

I was thrilled last month to get a phone call out of the blue from a Lynnwood Elementary School teacher I had covered years ago, someone who exemplifies kindness for me.

I instantly recognized the warm tones of Corrine Falope’s voice. Before she retired, she had educated kids not just in book learning but in less tangible human qualities.

I participated in a schoolwide assembly she had orchestrated in 1990 after she read that fifth-grade girls are “already thinking about hooking their wagons to some male star rather than thinking what they can do or be themselves,” she said then.

Her fourth-grade students developed their own play about the life of the first woman doctor in America. And boys and girls at the school listened to the stories of modern women with professions ranging from pilot to journalist.

Asked about where her own career goals had come from Falope said, “I wanted to be a teacher since I was 9 years old. I think it’s a really important profession.” She went on, “I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. I’m Black. Being in a segregated society, when I was in high school, we got the leftover books. They were ragged.”

But, even without an equal chance at public education in Atlanta, Falope’s youthful dreams were nourished by strong women. Her grandmother was a teacher. Her mother was a social worker who had been to Oberlin College. 

“My Aunt Dorothy started a program to train poor women to iron laundry — fine linen,” she said. “They would have been on the street. She had them link up with the women they ironed for.”

Falope telephoned me last month because she had good news about one of her students, with whom she has stayed in touch over the years. Judy Carey Nevin, now a university library manager in Ohio, had just published her fourth children’s book, which had been named a top book by Amazon.

Falope remembered Nevin as a bright fourth-grader who loved to read. Falope visited her when she worked for a publishing house in New York City.

She also told me a moving story about the book, “Sister Anne’s Hands”; Nevin put Falope in touch with the author, Marybeth Lorbieki. Falope had started to read the book to her Lynnwood fourth-graders without having first read it herself.

It’s about a black nun who faces prejudice in her classroom, said Falope. The book, set in the 1960s, is told from the point of view of a 7-year-old girl, Anna, a student at a Catholic school with no Black students or teachers.

Anna describes meeting Sister Anne on the first day of school: “When she reached out to touch my cheek, I dodged her hand as if it were hot. It was puppy brown with white lacy moons for nails and palm side up, it was pink with dark lines — a light, pretty pink like an evening dress for Barbie. I tried not to stare.”

As Falope read the story out loud to her students, she was overcome with emotion, remembering when she was a young teacher in Ohio and had touched a boy’s hand. Her young student had made a big show of wiping off that touch, running his hand up and down his pants leg and grimacing.

“I tried to pull it together,” said Falope. Finally, she asked one of her students to take up reading the book and went out into the hallway to cry and compose herself.

When she returned to her classroom, Falope told her students what had happened to her long ago. She had kept it in all those many years.

When her students heard her story, one said,”Howrude!” Another said, “You should have told someone.”

“It was like a therapy session,” said Fallope.

That is a story of kindness. Students comforted the teacher they loved.

When I talked to Nevin about it for last week’s Enterprise podcast about her new book, Nevin saw it as progress having been made, that modern children didn’t harbor the same prejudices as the fictional 1960s children who had been mean to their teacher until she set them straight by teaching them about racism.

The title of Nevin’s latest book is “All Kinds of Kindness.” “Kindness is so easy and it’s free,” says Nevin.

We believe that kindness can be taught — whether it is through a book or through personal interaction — and it’s never too late to learn.

Many of us grew up hearing Aesop’s fable, which has been told since ancient times, about the mighty lion who lets a helpless mouse go as the mouse promises to help the lion someday in return.

This seems preposterous to the lion. Nevertheless, the freed mouse later hears the roar of the lion, trapped with ropes, and chews through the ropes to set him free.

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted,” is the lesson taught from Aesop’s fable.

But we would argue for kindness even without the payback.

The mask you wear today could prevent the spread of the coronavirus to someone you’ve never met, perhaps someone vulnerable enough to die from the disease. You’ll never know the outcome of your kindness. You won’t be rewarded like the lion who was set free.

But the kindness you show may have its own rewards. Falope spent a career teaching children the values of caring and, in the end, those children cared for her.