This was my first full week of work in eight months. I was filling in at an online celebrity news site for Christmas vacation. It’s ironic, because at my old job I was somewhat of a Christmas jinx.
Being Jewish, I was always called upon to fill in Christmas week for supervisors or colleagues who were taking off for the holiday. Year after year, it seemed as soon as I was somewhat in charge the world started falling apart.
Two years stand out in my mind.
2004 It was early morning, the day after Christmas. I was in New York and it was going to be my first day filling in for the New York Senior Hard News Producer. I get a call on my cell phone from Paulette Brown, an Early Show producer , very sweetly and politely informing me that several people died in a large earthquake off the coast of Thailand. I will never forget my response. I said,” Thanks Paulette, but I doubt that’s a story for us unless the damage gets much worse.” Little did I know I was walking into one of the biggest stories of the decade. When I got to work hundreds were dead, by day’s end thousands were dead as the damage and death toll from the worst tsunami in modern history continued to grow.
Fast forward two years, December 26th, 2006, the death of President Gerald Ford. I was once again in New York filling-in. We were prepared for the death of the 93-year old former President and I carried around a black binder with names and numbers of contacts. Still when it happens Christmas week it’s a different ball game. We had to call bosses in from vacation, hold emergency meetings and ruin the holiday for lots of folks.
There was the year a man dressed as Santa shot up a holiday party killing nine people, and the Christmas day a tiger killed someone at the San Francisco zoo.
Despite the tendency for bad news, there is something fun about being in the newsroom Christmas week. There’s a comraderie among the left behind crew, the people working while everyone else is off. And, there’s food, lots of it . Vendors send chocolate, popcorn, cookies, all sorts of goodies. At The Early Show, we started a Christmas tradition, we would order in gourmet peanut butter sandwiches and eat them together in the conference room. When Christmas and Chanukah fell at the same time we ordered latkes as well.
At the newsroom this week, there was chocolate and there was comraderie but that’s where the comparison ends. I thought of my colleagues covering the rain-storm that battered Southern California and the snow-storm battering the East Coast, but in the celebrity news world those were non events. The biggest news was Lindsay Lohan’s rehab tussle, followed by “Teen Mom’s” brief stay in jail.
I confess, I had never heard of Teen Mom before, but hey that’s what google’s for. Despite the differences, it was good to be working again for Christmas, good to know I wasn’t the Christmas jinx and good to know that writing news is like riding a bicycle.
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