Christmas 2005 Observations

We travelled quite a distance yesterday - a trek downtown to church and back home to the south end, and then a trip to the east end of town with a detour to downtown before heading back home.  In all our our travels on Christmas Day, I'm surprised to say that out of all the miles we covered, we only saw one restaurant open: Waffle House.  And it was the newly remodeled Waffle House just a mile or two from work, even.  We passed by it at about 9:30 in the morning, and at about 9:30 at night, and both times the parking lot was full and it didn't look like there was an empty seat available in the place.

I knew that there wouldn't be many restaurants open on Christmas Day, but I thought there would at least be a few open, for those that had no desire to cook Christmas dinner.  But no. No fast food, no steak joints, no chain restaurants, no Mom and Pop diners - nothing.  In keeping with the them from the funny movie "The Christmas Story" where Ralphie and his family have Christmas dinner at the Chinese restaurant, we didn't even see any Chinese restaurants open, either.  So if you wanted to go out to eat yesterday, you were out of luck if you didn't live close to a Waffle House. 

Another interesting observation came at Walgreens.  It was the only store open on Christmas Day.  A few years ago, I started a personal crusade about Walgreens being open on every holiday and vowed that I would not go there and shop on said holidays out of solidarity to the employees who were forced to work on the holiday when everyone else was off. And until yesterday, I kept my vow.  But since that was the only place open, that was where Dr. Joe called in my prescription.  So we stopped there on the way home from church to pick it up.  First of all, we had to park next door in the bingo hall parking lot because the Walgreens parking lot was full.  And we didn't park next to the drugstore side of the lot, either; we had to park on the other side of the bingo hall in their big lot.  I knew that was a bad sign. 

When I got in the drugstore, I counted 26 other people crammed back by the pharmacy, all 27 of us waiting for a prescription.  And there were at least that many people standing in line in the front of the drugstore, waiting to be checked out.  The majority of them were buying either batteries or potato chips.  I did see one girl in line purchasing an EPT home pregnancy kit.  I bet she had a Merry Christmas.