Bartending on Christmas Is Debaucherous, Depressing, and Everything in Between

Welcome back to Restaurant Confessionals, where we talk to the unheard voices of the restaurant industry from both the front-of-house (FOH) and back-of-house (BOH) about what really goes on behind the scenes at your favorite establishments. Ever wondered how weird it gets when you're behind the bar on the most emotionally loaded holiday of the year? A Brooklyn bartender is here to fill you in.

I've worked on Christmas for a few years in New York, but I was living in San Francisco for my first year working it. I bartended Thanksgiving and Christmas that year—I think it was 2011.

Christmas got fucking weird. We tried to book a party at the bar where I worked, but it totally devolved into the worst drug fest I've ever seen. It was people who shouldn't do drugs to begin with, doing them on the worst, most depressing day a year to do a ton of drugs.

I got asked to work at this unnamed bar in San Francisco on Christmas Day, and we said, "You know what? Let's do a combination punk rock and trap music Christmas! Let's meld all the degenerate music and make it go down!"

It's already a city full of orphans, so we figured people would want to go out and get faded. We had DJs and shit, people coming in off the street. An unnamed friend of mine, whom I was working with, decided to buy about $200 worth of crack. At about 10 PM, the idea of bartending on Christmas actually started to really depress me. I was working a double, by the way—from 3 PM to 2 AM. So at 10 PM I was, let's say, "in the bag." I did ten or 12 shots that night. And I thought it would be a nice idea to smoke crack while bartending.

Mind you, there's this party going on. In my inebriated state, I thought it would be smart to smoke the crack while crouching into those sliding-door refrigerators under the bar and pretending to look for a beer, and then exhale said crack when I came up. People called me out in the first ten seconds, which was hilarious. Apparently, nothing scares white girls more than a punk guy smoking crack on Christmas.

I was high enough at that point that I had to just be like, Well, I guess I've just got to keep smoking crack. But around midnight I started to crash really hard, and I made my barback close down the bar. I went back to my Tenderloin apartment, and I pretty much didn't leave for two and a half days. It wasn't so much the hangover that was punishing, it was the thought that I smoked crack while at work. On Christmas. I think I had just decided to fixate on drugs to take away the actual depression of working on Christmas. It was an outlet, like, "I'm gonna outdo all these motherfuckers. You want to be sad and alone? Check this out. Your kids don't talk to you? I'm smoking crack right now."

I think there's an underlying nature there that's like, "Let's all get fucked up on Christmas cuz we're alone!" But there's another side that's like, actually, here's why you think this way.

For the past five years I've worked through the holidays, and then in January I go somewhere warm. I will emotionally remove myself from it and say it's for the money, but when I first started bartending Christmas Eve, Christmas, Thanksgiving, it was because of those dreaded words: I had nothing else better to do. Customers may find it weird to think, "You had nothing better to do tonight than work? I came to this bar to get away from work." But in the bartending scene, it's part of the profession. People figure, I don't have anyone to eat ham with, or a tree. I'll just make some drinks for people.

People go out in groups on Christmas, but there are also the people who are out alone. Often it's groups of lonely people who figure, We don't have any family to go home to this year, so let's just all go out together. Maybe I have a little more respect for the dude who's like "I'm here alone, motherfucker," though it makes me wonder, "What did you do to deserve this?"

If a bunch of good ol' Southern boys who are out doing military time somewhere and are like "We want to come out and talk about football" or something want to go out and get trashed together on Christmas, that's fine, but there are also the drunk, affected hipsters who totally have the option of going to see their parents but refuse to, who say, "I could go home, but I don't want to go all the way to Beacon and deal with my uncle." I mean, that's an hour away, and a lot of people don't have that afforded to them? And in many cases those are the people you see out more on Christmas, the people who have privilege to go home to their family, but choose to avoid it.

Maybe I'm taking it a step too far to assume that, but is your self-pity one of your cool points? This barfly idea that we have, of being along at a bar on a holiday, gets very romanticized. I've seen it, I've done it; in the past 12 years, I've only had three to five Christmases spent at home. My family lives 3,000 miles away, and isn't close to me. But the real vibe of loneliness isn't something you want to experience, because if you're in a roaming pack of people all drinking together, of course you're going to have fun.

But I think, you want to see alone, motherfucker? Go check out the Pit Stop Bar, near where I live. Those people are playing scratchers, those people wait for the doors to open at noon, and they drink their Coors Light in their seat with their social security check. That's alone. I should run a scared straight program where I take young hipsters to a crappy sports bar full of miserable old Polish people.

It's funny, because a lot of young bartenders and service industry people have an expectation that I should work on Christmas—people who are lonely go out on Christmas, people go out drinking. That notion, to start with, is kind of fucked. When you boil it down, yes, in this industry, lonely people coming in is definitely a fixture of how we make our money, but to expect it or look forward to it on a holiday is low-key sinister.

Maybe as I'm getting older, and I've been doing this for a while, I think, Fuck, man, I'd rather watch a movie in bed and eat Chinese food instead of, Yeah, I'm gonna make so much money off these people whose parents are dead!

Even if I wasn't bartending and I didn't have a family, I still wouldn't want to go to a fucking bar on Christmas. I would maybe reflect on my loneliness while eating this Chinese food in bed, but I wouldn't subject someone else to it. I do try to be especially nice to people on Christmas though, because why not?

I guess all's well that ends well. If you're out at a bar and end up going home with someone, another orphan who also came from a weird small town and they're lonely too, and you wake up the day after Christmas and realize you got it on, that's great. Bad sex, after all, is like pizza. Never that bad.

I didn't work on Christmas last year because I was in Albany watching a Skrewdriver cover band trying to escape a fight with skinheads while drinking enough Fireball to wash it all away, but that's another weird story. I just figured, I'm gonna go make poor decisions on Christmas this year, because I'm a bartender.

As told to Hilary Pollack

This post was originally published in December 2015.