Temporarily unset bash option -x

I like to use set -x in scripts to show what's going on, especially if the script is going to run in a CI/CD pipeline and I might need to debug some failure post-hoc. One annoyance with doing this is that if I want to echo some text to the user (e.g., a status message or "I'm starting to do $X") then that message gets output twice - once for the echo command itself being echoed, and then once as the output of that echo command. What's a good way to make this nicer? One solution is this:

set -x

... bunch of normal commands that get echoed

(
  # Temporarily don't echo, so we don't double-echo
  set +x
  echo "Here is my status message"
)

... rest of commands get echoed again

But the two problems with that are 1. That's a lot of machinery to write every time I want to tell the user something, and it's "non-obvious" enough that it probably requires the comment every time 2. It echoes the set +x too, which is undesirable. Is there another option that works well? Something like Make's feature of prepending an @ to suppress echoing would be great, but I've not been able to find such a feature in Bash.