Replacing “There are no events” with custom text

The organisation I support is doing very few events at the moment. They hope to do more, but they don’t know when that is likely. I have set up a VSEL widget on the sidebar and this shows “There are no upcoming events”, which is perfectly correct, of course, but they would prefer something a bit more optimistic, particularly as it shows on the main page of the site. None of us a very happy with a “because of covid” banner over the front page, but a quiet confident message that implies we are working on it would do the job nicely.

I could always remove the widget and replace it with a text widget, but that would mean that at some unknown point in the future I would have to swap them back again. I would much prefer some way of setting a different message within the widget. Some kind of property setting equivalent to title and so on would mean that my users would be able to make changes themselves. Is that possible? Is there some other way to do it?

Just for completeness, I saw the item on using CSS to hide the message. Doing things with CSS seems semi-permanent and, logistically, is much the same as swapping the VSEL widget for a text widget.

Thanks for looking at this.