It’s just days before December 25th and I’m not even close to having my holiday shopping done. In all honesty, I haven’t really started. A stack of holiday cards lay on the dining room table awaiting a final stamp before I send them off. There are no presents under the tree. I don’t have a holiday menu picked out. Not one Christmas cookie has emerged from my oven.
My heart is full of cheer but I just can’t get myself to catch up to all the holiday festivity making. It’s not that I don’t believe in celebrating. I do. It’s just that I’m not like other people. I celebrate a different kind of holiday. I wait until January 25th for a little holiday I like to call Restaurant Christmas.
Restaurant Christmas happens on (or around) January 25th and looks a lot like your typical Christmas celebration. Restaurant Christmas is about celebrating love, joy and hope. But one big difference is there’s a lot less traffic. Also, airline tickets back home are less expensive, gifts are on sale, vacation is easier to come by, and my family and loved ones are less stressed because they don’t have four different parties to go to and numerous commitments to fulfill on the very same day.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about when I refer to Restaurant Christmas, it’s because Restaurant Christmas isn’t celebrated by many. As a matter of fact, Restaurant Christmas isn’t really known by many people at all because it’s something I invented several years back.
Restaurant Christmas came to be because I needed a way to get through the holidays with my job in the service industry intact. It’s a self-made holiday which gives me the ability to work every holiday season at my restaurant job with a smile on my face.
My first Restaurant Christmas began one January 25th almost a decade ago when I recognized that only a few restaurant employees can take a vacation during the holiday season. In the world of restaurants, most employees—especially the managers—are required to work through the holidays because Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years are some of the busiest days of the year. So rather than leave a career I loved because of missing out on spending time with my distant family, I decided to create my own kind of celebration.
Thus, Restaurant Christmas was born.