Christmas Horror Stories

Yeah, my company used to make us give a $10 deposit to attend our Christmas party, then tried to make you feel guilty and have you donate it to their charity (United Way) afterward. They would eventually refund it back to you but only after you had bitched about it.

They were so cheap they didn't want to pay for your meal if you said you were going to be there and then couldn't make it. One year they actually stiffed me because I got sent out on an assignment after I had already committed the money to the party and then I couldn't get out of covering a story to attend. They refused to give me my money back even though my boss made out the schedule so that I couldn't make it to the party.

 

Was starting to type a couple up, but then realized they might just be depressing. Hmmm ...

 

Well, there was the time we were visiting family in Alabama (that's not the worst part). I borrowed my sister's car to run over to the grocery store, where I used the pay phone to call my then-girlfriend back home. Was on the phone for 40 minutes or so, then headed back to the house. Sis came out shortly thereafter to get the gifts out of the car. Half of them were missing! Oh, shit. I had left the window down and the door unlocked. She was hysterical, crying and everything, and I felt like the biggest dipshit. There was not a damn thing I could do, being a newly minted journalist with no money to reimburse her for my mistake, so I just had to wallow in my guilt the rest of the trip.

 

And after all the shit that's gone on at work the past several years, how in the hell do I not have a Christmas story?

There also was the time Mom and Dad got in a fight on Christmas Eve. Ruined the rest of the night, and we were all still a little frosted about it the next day. Mom and Dad patched things up and were back in love, and we were all giddy, opening gifts and such. My big gift that year was a basketball goal to put in the driveway. After the festivities, we got to work putting that sumbitch together. Had most of the heavy lifting done, and the tall post completely assembled. Mom came out to see if we needed drinks or anything, and Dad turned and whacked her right across the face and broke her nose!

 

The year my father-in-law got drunk before dinner and then decided to chase me outside the house for some stupid reason. I wasn't happy about that, so I led him just enough to let him get close, then cut through a hedgerow and heard him smack those bushes at full tilt.

He had no memory of it the next day, and no idea why he was picking thorns out of his face.

The marriage didn't last.

 

Longtime lurker, but I had to log in to tell this one.

Our paper specialized in having a heartstring-tugging story for Christmas. One year they found this deeply religious family who lived out in the woods, home-schooling their kids. Sadly, the father developed some kind of inoperable kidney or bladder cancer and had only a few months to live. This was likely to be the last Christmas the kids shared with their dad.

The story was on Page One with a big photo layout when my eagle-eyed night GA reporter ran Dad's name in the state's online data bank of court records (it was Christmas Eve, a slow night). He had convictions for lewd and lascivious behavior and endangering the safety of a police officer, a felony. The guy seemed so squeaky clean, nobody had bothered to check his background as they put the story together.

We called the AME and we decided it would be necessary to call the guy (they did have a phone) to have him explain why he had a morals conviction on his record. The wife answered and said her husband couldn't be interrupted because he was reading the kids Bible stories. She gave this explanation of her husband's past: He was driving into the city for a cancer treatment when he developed an urgent need to urinate because of his condition. He pulled over to the side of the busy highway to answer the call of nature, and within moments a deputy pulled up behind him. The cop cited him for exposing his genitals in public, which got the ailing man a little huffy. As he pulled away from the shoulder, he came a little too close to the deputy, who was still standing on the side of the road. That raised the stakes considerably.

The guy could probably have had the charges reduced way down by simply explaining his plight in court, but he chose not to contest them.

At one point I got on the phone with the wife, who was outraged by our Christmas Eve interruption. She said we sought them out to do the story, and she was sorry they had agreed to it. I mumbled something about them having an exemplary story to tell, and she said, "To you, it's a story. To us, it's our life."
I felt smaller than Tiny Tim that night.

 

Not sure I would believe that explanation, but it's pissable.

 

This thread is bringing back memories of some holiday occurrences I hadn't thought of in a while (not horror stories, but still funny).

Anyone ever have to deal with a fill-in newsroom editor in charge on a holiday who wasn't well-versed in the ways of sports? This happened to me on a Christmas night about 20 or so years ago when I was in the sports slot. Because of vacations and holidays off, the editor in charge (a role typically held by the night news editor, who also ran the news desk) was the business editor. She normally left at 5 p.m., knew little about sports and had a reputation for being unreasonable.

She came wandering over at about 7 p.m. on Christmas, and I still recall the conversation:

Editor in charge: "I hear you guys haven't rolled any pages yet. Isn't this a slow day for you?" (Several A and B section pages had rolled already because the news desk had done some editing in advance.)

Me: "All of our local copy (consisting mostly of features/notebooks on our local NFL and NBA teams and a few bowl advances on the college football teams we covered) is in. The pages are designed, the desk came in at 4:30, and we're almost done editing everything. It will all be typeset in an hour or less. After that, it's just a matter of waiting for the night NBA game to finish."

Editor in charge: "But why haven't you rolled any pages?"

Me: "The composing room (this was a few years before we were paginated, and the backshop was at a production plant about 15 miles away) normally works on sports pages last because our pages have the most late copy. I'm sure they're following that procedure tonight, even though we've got a lot done. But we're doing fine. We won't have any trouble making our deadlines."

Editor in charge: "You haven't rolled any pages yet. That is COMPLETELY unacceptable!"

Me (trying to stay cool): "All I can say is we're doing our best." She stormed off.

We wound up having just one page -- NBA -- out with 90 minutes until deadline, and that rolled about 30 minutes early once the roundup and box were done. The editor in charge stayed away from me the rest of the night.

So the next day, I read her night note (which all the top execs received). It mentioned that the paper made all deadlines but targeted sports for "poor page flow" (at this paper, "page flow" was just as important as accurate stories and headlines and the deadlines themselves). The sports editor laughed about it and said he'd smooth it over, and that was the last I heard about it.

 

I love these last two posts (Mr. Graybeard and Bronco77). There's always a good story in every newsroom, especially around the holidays.

 

Circulation size doesn't determine how you're treated at Christmas:

Mid-major (1982-84): Two weeks' pay for Christmas bonus

250K Metro (1984-89 and 1990-93): $25 gift certificate to grocery store

500K metro (1989-90): Two days' pay if you took no sick days all year, one day's pay if you took one sick day

Million-circulation daily: Frozen turkey (donated to shelter).

 

Never received anything from a company for Christmas.

 

Frank's post rings true. My first employer (35K circulation) paid 2 percent of your annual salary as a Christmas bonus. It remains the best holiday bonus of my career -- not lavish, but much-appreciated on a starting salary of $10.4K a year. Management was very community-minded, and our top editor once said that the idea was that employees would spend the bonus money locally and it would cycle back into the area's economy (some of my bonus money certainly helped the economy of the local bars).