I'll Be Horned For Christmas

By DerbyGhost

Krampus Sacks - For the bad boys and girls out there. This smoked chocolate milkshake in a glass will leave you begging for another taste. 

There’s really only so much you can do with eggnog, let’s be honest here. Eggnog exists for two reasons. Someone wants to have drinkable pudding, or as a vehicle to deliver as much hard liquor as possible into their bloodstream over the shortest period of time. Back in the day when the Victorians were telling each other scary ghost stories and before Santa started his crippling Coke addiction, people made eggnog with brandy. Someone looked at this weird thin pudding concoction and thought “yeah let’s slap the Super Wine into this bad boy. And then let’s go snort some more mummies! Tally-ho!” That’s verbatim. It’s written word for word in the first recipe for eggnog, trust me.

It's not that I don’t like the taste of eggnog, sure it’s not for everyone but there is something about the nutmeg and smooth creamy taste that does always remind me of Christmas with my family. My mom has this old recipe that she got from her mum that she guards like a hawk. It’s probably the most basic thing, clipped from a Good Housekeeping magazine that had tips on how to best decorate your fallout shelter. But the joy that she has when she serves it is what makes a mug of that stuff so damn good. She gets this sad little smile and tells us it’s not quite how her mother used to make it, but it was good enough.

I told myself I wouldn’t think about her this year. Well, I’m already disappointing the rest of the family by not making it home on time for Christmas day. Might as well disappoint myself too. 

What is Christmas if not the time for disappointments?

 A disappointment of a son sitting in a disappointment of a bar sipping on the weakest nog known to man. I, for one, blame airports in general for my stink mood. Airports and capitalism. Airports by themselves are already this in-between place, a soft place that never feels completely present. All airports are a different flavor of misery, but how they deliver that misery differs from place to place. The Detroit airport doesn’t seem to have a single working bathroom. Atlanta is a maze of terminals with the smell of the miniature gut busting Krystal burgers lingering in the air like the stench of failure. San Francisco is weirdly comfortable, but that probably came at the price of raising the rent of smaller airports until they had to move out.

And it’s not just airports that have a specific vibe to them, air travelers do too. Trust me, I had done my fair share of people watching over the course of the day. There were always the harried parents trying and failing to keep their kids together and entertained long enough to get on their dang flight. Businesspeople who had More Important Things to Do balancing laptops and tablets on their legs while making snide remarks at their coworkers over the phone. And of course the Flight Attendants! The unsung heroes of the Airport. 

There was one now, making her way through the crowds. She wove in and out of the traffic patterns with the ease of an airport veteran- dodging trailing toddlers and lost luggage with a ditzy smile on her face. Her uniform, unlike what you typically picture when you think flight attendant, was a complete mess. Her blouse was untucked, and I could obviously see that she was wearing two mismatched socks. Her hair was a frizzy mess that didn’t seem like it could be contained. Not that I particularly judged her, obviously, nobody looks their best in the airport. 

At this moment, I realized that I was still staring right at her as she was getting closer and closer to the shitty bar that I was posted up in. In fact, she seemed to be looking right at me. Averting my eyes, I went back to looking at my half empty glass of nog. What if she tried talking to me? Was she mad? I mean I was being a creep. Should I apologize or something? It was then that a sweet rich voice interrupted me from my train of thought. 

“Hey, whatcha up to?” She sat down at the seat next to mine, placing a rich inky drink down in front of her. She was… sitting near me? Why? 

All I could do was stare, which I know was rude. There had to be something to say in this situation but all I could actually respond with was “uhhh…”

“Not the talkative type, eh? That’s okay i can talk enough for the two of us.” She looked at me for a second, and then in an elementary school teacher sing-song of a voice she sang. “Rudolf, with your nose so bright, why are you getting blitzed tonight?” 

Rather than divulge any personal information to the hot mess of a flight attendant, I went for the traditional time honored sarcasm. “Rudolf? Seriously? An’ y’know if we’re doing reindeer wouldn’t it just be an easier pun for you to say I’m Blitzen? Works better and quicker.” 

“Well Rudolf is nicer nickname than Grinch, and it made you smile a lil. You just looked so mopey all alone, like you could use a drinkin’ buddy! And, besides it let me sing a bit, and I’ll take any excuse to sing.” She shot me a sly smile. “I just really like singing, okay, and in my field, I have to present a façade of professionalism. Can’t go charging down the aisles belting out Mariah Carey while I’m handing out ginger ale and teeny bags of harvest cheddar sun chips.” 

I knew what she was up to. She was trying to bury me in banter to banish my baleful blues. I wasn’t having any of it though, and again turned to sarcasm to bash away her cheer. “What are you, some kind of Manic Pixie Dream Girl here to sing at me until I regain my sense of holiday spirit? Last I checked, this isn’t a Hallmark movie and we’re probably not going to end up happily ever after.” 

“Nah, I’m not really into guys. To be honest, you just looked kind of sad and in need of company. You give off a… Well, a hollow ring is a nice way to put it. I felt like we were potential kindred spirits sipping spirits.” The flight attendant paused and took another pull of her pitch-black drink and shivered. “You really shoulda ordered Krampus’s Sack. That’s the secret best drink here. Their eggnog pretty much comes out of a bottle, but the Sack is entirely handmade and tastes wicked.”

Eyeing the inky monstrosity, I shook my head. “I don’t think I could drink someone’s Sack.”

“Your loss. Your loss. It tastes like a campfire, dark and smokey with a little hint of sweet. This sack is supreme, sugar.”

I rolled my eyes, failing to hide a grin. “Now you just want to say sack.” 

“Got me.” She smiled again, shifting her weight on the barstool. “So, got a name, or should I keep calling you Rudolf? Because there’s, like, nobody else here.” She took a moment and waved around at the rest of the bar. She was right, it was completely empty. Everyone else was waiting at the gates with their family or trying to bunker down for the night until the flights could move again. “And I would very much like to get to know someone, even if it’s someone who is obviously having a rough one. Actually, especially if they’re havin’ a rough one.”

There it was again. The pity. The same look that I got from friends who ‘just wanted to pop by for a drink’ or relatives calling ‘to check in on me.’ It was all the same. People could figure out I was damaged goods from the get-go, try to help to make themselves feel better, and then drop me once they realized I was broken beyond repair. “Why?” 

“Because it’s Christmas! The time of miracles and caring. Getting to know and help your fellow man? All that kind of bs. If you want another reason, how about I’m BORED. Capital B, capital O, capital R, capital E, capital D. My favorite bar isn’t open while it sets up for our Christmas party in like, an hour. None of my friends got booked for the same flight as me, and I finished my last book flying here. The stores are closed. There is nothing for me to do but wait, so why not make a new friend.” The longer she kept talking, the more she began to fidget with her drink. At first it was just stirring it gently with the lil tiny sip straws that were included. Then she migrated into pinching one of the two speared marshmallows. The stimming was well known to an anxious mess like me. 

“Hold up a sec. You’re… lonely?” She wasn’t here taking pity on me? “You need a buddy for Christmas more than anyone, huh?”

“Well,” she huffed, “I wouldn’t put it that way. But yes. Airports during the Holidays kind of suck, especially if you have nobody to share them with.”

“I know right!” I think my voice shot up a few octaves, or maybe it was just the nog finally catching up with me. But this changed everything. If I wasn’t a pity project, I was instead someone who could help. Who could maybe make her holiday nice, even if mine was kind of in the toilet. Who knows, maybe we both could turn this day around. “It’s just like a complete energy drain here. Just bad vibes from floor to ceiling. Rancid”

The mystery flight attendant nodded, “Toxic to the bone. For real, for real. I always hate this terminal, but it has some of the better connecting flights than anywhere in the country.”

I looked around at the dump I found myself in and couldn’t help but doubt her entirely. “This place? Seriously?”

“Well it,” she blushed and stammered her words, “See, well, the thing is. You have to understand that it has some really great… international flights? Not great if you’re doing simple traveling but there’s a lot to it that is good in the industry, despite its many flaws.”

“Uh-huh…”

“No seriously!” 

“We have, like, one flight to Paris nonstop and one flight to London. Barely enough to even qualify as an international airport.” 

“It’s behind the scene’s stuff, you wouldn’t know, okay Rudolf?” She punctuated her statement with a violent nod that caused one of her earrings to snag in her hair.

“Trevor.”

She blinked. “What?”

“Trevor, my name’s unfortunately Trevor. Not Rudolf. You asked for it and I kind of was being a dick holding it back from you. I dunno. It's gross. Picture a guy named Trevor. I’m picturing Puddle of Mudd and lectures on how we should return to Ancient Rome. Real statue of Apollo profile picture energy. S’Gross.”

“Aww see you can open up! And you’re no longer being a sourpuss Grinch.” She flicked my nose, getting an awkward stutter in response. “Now we can have some normal talkies, ain’t that sweet?”

“Ah… yeah, true.” I grimaced for a second as I took a moment to reflect upon how my behavior had been all conversation. “Sorry for being a little touchy when I think that people are trying to… fix me. S’been a rough year. I kind of shut down hard when you were putting on your whole Christmas Spirit front.”

“I get it. Holidays can be rough for everyone, I never really was much for social graces an’ all that. But hey it broke the ice, right?”

“Almost damn near sent us sinking into the frozen lake below, down to the woeful, whimsical, painfully white depths of lake Woebegone. Shit that came out way more negative and Prairie Home Bullshit than I meant it. Um. . . How about this.” I scrambled for a moment to find the right thing to say. She had gone out of her way to try to talk to me, and maybe this was what I needed to pull my brain out of whatever humbug hole it had found itself in. “How about you tell me your name, and then I’ll get us a round of Krampus Sacks and we get to know each other a little bit? Does that sound okay?”

It turned out in fact to be more than okay for Ashley, my new airport BFF.