My grandmother, Beulah Abigail Holliday Whitson, worked as a young woman at Cook County Hospital in Chicago during the 1918 Spanish Flu. As such, she was quarantined in the hospital for many weeks. Her brother Victor gave her a candle stick for Christmas to be used as a simple means to let him know that she was OK. Every night after her shift, she would place the candle in the window of her dorm room and light it to let him know that she was still alive.