They Work on Christmas Day

And what would we do without them?

It is not often you have an epiphany while getting your hair cut. I am not even sure what “epiphany” means without looking it up. If it means a sudden, unexpected idea, this is what it was.

“Are you open on Christmas Day?” I asked Kenny, my hair cutter, last week.

Kenny is a smooth, dark-haired Vietnamese gent who works fast. He wields his scissors like a Benihana chef carving a cut of meat with a knife. Ten minutes is a long time to be in the chair with him.

The question came out of the blue and took him by surprise. Kenny doesn’t talk much anyhow; he’s all work. “Christmas?” he mumbled through his mask. “No. We open the day after though.”

Kenny’s shop—he runs it with his wife, also Vietnamese, who also cuts hair, though much less dramatically than her husband—is in a small corner mall. After paying I had the bright idea—more of this epiphany thing—to do a quick survey of the other shops in the mall to see what their Christmas plans were.

The nail salon? Closed. The frozen yogurt parlor? Ditto. A bank branch and an insurance office? Naturally, both closed. What about Raggs coffee shop, one of the more popular hangouts in town? It has to be open, right?

Nope. And the Subway next to it? It’s shuttered that day, too.

The only place in the mall set to be open on Christmas was a Nation’s. Its hours were until 8 p.m. on Wednesday, said a sign on the door. I decided to ask the employees what they thought about that and walked in.

Shelves of apple, pumpkin, pecan, and crème pies stared at me from inside a gleaming display case. Behind the counter an employee in a red apron was pushing around a hamburger patty on the grill with onions on the side.

Her associate, also in an apron, was waiting on a customer but she spared me a moment to talk. Not only were they open on Christmas, she was working it. It was not a prospect she was looking forward to with any pleasure.

“I’ve worked for this company 12 years,” she said resignedly. “It is what it is.”

After leaving I sort of felt sorry for the woman. But then I remembered my mom and my attitude toward her did a complete 180.

We celebrated Christmas with my mother on Christmas Eve night at her condo in Alameda. That was when we opened presents with her. Inevitably, when you unwrapped a gift from her, it would come with a story of how she bought it and most important, the added information that if we didn’t like it she had saved the receipt and we could always return it.

On the next day, festivities shifted to Agnes’s house in Pleasanton. Agnes was Barb’s mother, Barb being my brother’s wife. Agnes’s provided a good central meeting site for the two sides of our clan—the Nelson side and the Gordon side—to come together for a big Christmas afternoon meal.

My mother’s job every year was to bring dessert. Not being a big cook or baker, mom always stopped at the Nation’s in Alameda on her way over to Agnes’s. She usually brought two pies—a classic pumpkin and maybe a chocolate or coconut crème. The kids loved them.

It occurred to me that without Nation’s being open on Christmas Day, and without employees like the woman I spoke to being willing to work even though they really don’t want to, my mom might have shown up at our gatherings empty-handed.

Actually, I know my mother would have figured something out and found a way to bring dessert anyhow. But you get my point:

LET’S HEAR IT FOR THE PEOPLE WHO ARE WORKING CHRISTMAS!

The list is endless, millions and millions of people all over. Pilots, flight attendants, airline crews. Police and fire, wastewater treatment plant operators. Emergency workers of all kinds. Doctors, nurses, paramedics. Snowplow operators on our high mountain passes when a big storm hits. Those long-haul truckers must get through. They’re always on the road, making America work.

Bars are open. So are liquor stores and many restaurants like Nation’s. They all have people who are suiting up and doing the job that needs to be done. The same for gas stations. They need people. They don’t run themselves.

While department stores and retail shops are generally closed, many of their employees come in late on Christmas Day to get their store ready for the morning after. Lots of people, including military women and men, may not work on Christmas but they’re on call and ready to throw on their boots and head out the door if the need arises.

Churches are in business too, holding services. Come to think of it, an angel was on the job on the very first Christmas Day. His sudden appearance in the fields outside Bethlehem scared the heck out of some shepherds who were working the late shift that night, tending to their flock.

The angel reassured them, though. “Fear not,” he said. “For behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.” And a chorus of heavenly voices joined him singing, “Glory to God in the highest, and peace and good will toward men.”

This passage is among the most famous in all the Bible, and it plays a meaningful role in one of the most beloved Christmas specials ever, A Charlie Brown Christmas. Overwhelmed and distraught by the commercialism of the holiday, Charlie Brown cries out for someone, anyone, to tell him what Christmas is all about.

Linus, his comfort blanket in hand, steps forward on stage and explains it to him, reciting the beautiful words of Luke.

A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired on national TV in 1965 and it remains popular even in the age of streaming. An IMDB poll of 10,00 movie and TV fans ranked it the third-most favorite Christmas show ever, behind top-rated It’s A Wonderful Life and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. (Die Hard was #4.)

Its writer and creator was Charles M. Schulz, the cartoon artist whose funny and wise Peanuts comic strips appeared in daily newspapers around the world for decades and grew into a multimedia empire—books, television programs, movies—that still thrives today.

Schulz, who died in 2000, did the body of his work in a studio close to his home in Santa Rosa, California, in Sonoma County. (It is now the site of a museum bearing his name.) A quiet-living man of faith, he typically spent Christmas at home with his wife Jean and their children and in later years, their grandchildren.

But did “Sparky” (his nickname) work on Christmas Day? You bet he did.

His was a restless, prodigiously fertile, always thinking mind. If an idea came to him—an idea, perhaps, for some new mess his alter ego Charlie Brown could get into—he would steal away from the family and go to his studio or some private place to have a moment to himself.

Ideas are like butterflies; they fly away so quickly. You can never take them for granted, and Schulz never did. Even on Christmas, if an idea called out to him. he went to work. He got it down on paper.

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Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukkah! God bless us all, each and every one!