How many of you readers have had an airport Christmas?
So many of you travel during the holiday season, several on tight schedules so I expect there have been quite a few who have found themselves trapped in an airport Christmas day instead of wrapped in a warm blanket in comfortable surroundings. We usually don’t travel at Christmas, and when we did, it was usually within Saskatchewan. I can only recall one airport Christmas in my repertoire and that was decades ago, when I was a teenager. My mom and I decided we needed to visit my sister in Hamilton so we booked a flight out of Regina Christmas Eve, since being in a retail business means you never “get away early.”
Fog kept us from landing in Toronto, so we ended up in Montreal. Christmas day dawned and we found ourselves moving from the Montreal airport to the train station where they had booked a train back to TO. They get to do that in Eastern Canada.
A beneficial side story was the fact my mother ran into long-ago best friends in the Montreal rail station as we waited, quite bedraggled and dirty, but making the best of a bad situation.
We were thankful to be in the more welcoming confines of the train station that had character, as opposed to the always cold and bloodless way stations that airports have become over the years. Their job is to move their cargo of humans in the most careless and complex systems that can be devised by logistical ogres hidden behind black curtains. Toronto’s airport, or I should say, airports, are the leading proponents of these ugly, messy and confusing way stations.
But I again, digress.
We eventually got on a train and my sister picked us up at the TO train station, five hours later, on Boxing Day and we had a wonderful two-day holiday and then headed back. Unfortunately it was on a plane. Fortunately, it was almost on time. A Christmas miracle!
On other memorable Christmas days, I have found myself in a restaurant eating Christmas pizza with a funny waitress and cook, enjoying their company as their lone customer.
The bride and I spent one Eve in the cab of a little truck, waiting out a blizzard somewhere in North Dakota after having already gone into the ditch (and back on the road again) once. It was a parking lot, with bright lights and a nearby Target, so we weren’t worried about exercising our minimum survival skills after learning there was no room at any inn. She wasn’t pregnant either, so no Christmas miracles awaited us.
We have all spent at least one Christmas season at someone’s bedside or perhaps ending up in some place we never expected to be.
One of my more memorable yuletides was spent on a Caribbean beach, the only warm weather Christmas I can recall. It was OK, but that’s the only time of year I get to appreciate cold and snow and I did miss that element … for 23 seconds.
So whereever you find yourselves on Christmas Day dear diary, make the most of it and if you have to spend it in an airport, it’s by design. The airport ogres are out to get you and their last name is Scrooge. They won’t have a good will awakening with a sudden decision to make your day any better, so just suck it up and put it in the memory bank to use prior to booking the flight south on Dec. 24 next year.
