Fourth in a series: We’re following folks who work through the holidays. Next week: feeding the animals at the Denver Zoo.
Among other things, Christmas is a landscape of locked doors — malls, jewelry shops, delis, you name it.
Stores, closed.
Employees, at home with their families.
But then there are the places with the neon “Open” in full atmospheric glow, and inside, the people with name tags on or aprons strapped to their waists.
Jon White, a bartender at Aurora’s Summit Steak and Seafood House, has tended bar every Christmas for the past eight years or so.
As December marches deeper into the holiday thicket, he says, things change in bars. Customers tend to drink more, and the moods that liquor nurtures — particularly, the signature boozy states of exuberance and sadness — grow more pronounced.
By the time the holiday itself arrives, it tends to be either/or.
Consider the Christmas a few years ago. A bunch of bikers showed up at the bar where White was working, on Long Island, N.Y. The guys commenced pounding beers and drinks, and quickly the place changed from placid to “all-out rowdy.”
“One guy dared the other he couldn’t do a 360 in the bar with his bike,” White recalls. “The guy came crashing into the bar with his Harley and did 360s. The jukebox got shattered. The guy crashed into a wall. The bathroom door was torn off.”
Later, they made a luge run, of sorts, out of snow and bar ice, and raced trays from the bar down the course.
“That was the craziest Christmas,” says White. “The rest of the time, it’s usually kind of depressing.”
Most of the drinks he pours are for people dining at tables. Sometimes, a group will plop themselves down at the bar and exude jolly, greeting White with “Merry Christmas” and big tips. Usually, though, the people who sit at the bar on Christmas Day keep to themselves.
“It’s easy for me to talk to a customer,” says White one snowy night at the Summit bar, a study in dark, thick wood that, if not for the car dealerships just outside the door, could be mistaken for a Teutonic lodge. “But on Christmas, they tend to just sit there.”
Things are different leading up to the big day, though.
“It’s easier for us to upsell things,” says White. “They are spending so much on everyone else, they want to spend more on themselves. . . . People splurge on wine, on alcohol. Then you see the soccer mom stumbling around the restaurant. There is more drinking and festivity. It’s definitely fun. They want to spoil themselves as much as they can.”
The holiday itself, though? When you’re working it, you wish you weren’t.
“It’s tough to work the holidays, no matter where you are,” he says. “You miss your family. You’d rather not see all of the other happy families.”
The Summit is open this Christmas, but for the first time in a while, White won’t be there. He’s visiting his brother this holiday.
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
