Holiday Guide 2009: Bartender
It’s the Island of Misfit Toys. Slightly saddened faces etched deep with perennial rejection line up and hang down along the bar as other people play out their sweater-stretching Christmas conviviality — the torn parcels, grandma’s dentures, the eggnog umbrage — into eventual familial scrapbooks. The holidays aren’t always for everybody, especially when you’re gay.…
Holiday Guide 2009: Cooks
See A Christmas Carol enough times and you’ll long for a traditional British Christmas dinner, no matter where you come from. Suddenly you find yourself craving a roast-turkey feast with all the puddings, pastries and stuffing on the side, made by hand with real butter. If you can’t make it back to Old Blighty this…
Holiday Guide 2009: Animal service officer
When there are only 27 people in the entire county who do your job, and your job is to protect animals all over the county 24/7, it’s inevitable that you are going to work a few holidays. So when Laura Tuttle, an animal services officer for Orange County, pulled a Christmas shift last year, it…
Holiday Guide 2009: ER nurse
At 4:30 a.m., Leesburg is a ghost town, even on Christmas Day. Soon kids will be launching themselves at the tree and their groaning parents will be yawning into their coffee. But at this hour, the streets are empty of traffic on Terri Wilson’s way to work, and they will be almost as quiet at…
Holiday Guide 2009: Stripper
The common wisdom is that suicides skyrocket during the holidays. Though this is entirely unsupported by research, the public buys it because it’s so easy to envision. The de facto mandate of family togetherness at this time of year seems destined to push the haunted lonely — those going through divorce or on the outs…
Holiday Guide 2009: Paramedic
If you find yourself walking the streets of downtown Orlando this Christmas and hear sleigh bells and an irritatingly cheerful chorus caroling “Jingle Bells” at you, it’s probably an ambulance. No, the city’s reviver elite hasn’t gone mad. As it turns out, for those unfortunate enough to be tasked with rushing to the saddest ’round-the-Christmas-tree…
