Avoiding work on the holiday beat

T’was the day after Christmas
And all through the blog
Nothing made sense
‘Cuz it’s the day after Christmas.

Now we know why Hallmark never sought my greeting card services.

So, it dawns on me around 12:30 p.m. Christmas Day, that it’s a workday. The Dec. 26 blog doesn’t materialize out of thin air, though it may seem that way at times.

---

The problem: I don’t WANT to work on Christmas. See, I retired to avoid ever having to work again on another holiday.

I’ve had my share of Christmas workdays. In the news biz, they generally fell into one of three categories:

— Nice, quiet day. Usually out in three hours. Still work, though.

— A few things to report here and there. Cop stuff. Maybe a wreck or two. Not a long day, but a paced one.

— All hell breaks loose. Something happens that takes immediate priority over everything else, and the fact that it's Christmas only exacerbates the situation.

Two of the latter stick out in my memory.

The first happened early in my Chronicle career. I’ll probably get this sequencing wrong, but I believe Christmas was Sunday that year. We didn’t have a Saturday paper, so Christmas Eve Eve was Friday.

We all got out of work early that day when, a few hours later, my pager went off. There had been a helicopter crash somewhere, I think near Ozello, and I had to track it down. This was late Friday afternoon, no paper on Saturday, Sunday is Christmas. 

This was the story: A man’s mother had paid for her son to take a helicopter tour. The helicopter crashed in the swamps, and the passenger helped the injured pilot through sawgrass to reach a little store, where they called for help.

I learned all that from the wife of the injured pilot, who I interviewed in the Citrus Memorial emergency waiting room. That woman today is a well-respected Citrus County politician, and we’ve known each other for years. I wonder if she remembers our encounter.

Cold weather is also a Christmas news possibility. Anyone who was around here for the 1989 Christmas freeze remembers that fun. Stories about busted pipes and power outages graced the Christmas editions that year.

Generally, though, by Christmas Day we’re all maxed out on Yuletide news. 

Everyone is pretty much exhausted with life by now. News tends to take a holiday between Christmas and New Year’s, which is why every news publication on the planet runs a series of year-end “review” stories during those five days.

Here’s a fun memory: My very first job out of college was with the Pioneer in Big Rapids, Michigan. Other than visiting this place for my job interview, I knew nothing of Big Rapids or Mecosta County, where it is the county seat.

I graduated from Central Michigan in December and started work the Monday after Christmas, which fell on Saturday. So, got it? My opening day is the 361st day of the year.

My first assignment: Write the year-in-review. In a place that was as foreign to me as Paris.

While I hated it at the time, it turned out to be a brilliant strategy on my editor’s part to get me up to speed with the important stuff. I sat in the upstairs conference room every afternoon pouring over bound editions of that year’s newspapers so I could glean enough information to write coherent year-in-review stories.

Which I did. But when my second year came along, I wrote a completely different set of year-in-review stories. Rather than simply repeat back what happened the last 12 months, I sought relevance for those issues and why they’re significant moving forward.

That’s been my year-in-review approach ever since.

As for the most recent Christmas, it started at 6:10 a.m. with a walk on the state trail with Bunny just as the morning sky was breaking. It ended with a delicious dinner with friends.

In between, I wrote this blog.

Another great Christmas story at the World Headquarters. Hope yours was equally special.

Enjoy this Thursday, friends.

​Join the discussion on our Facebook page.
​
Enjoying the blog? Please consider supporting it at Venmo, PayPal, or Patreon.