For at least 30 years, and maybe 35, I have dreaded the end-of-year Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.
It has nothing to do with the holidays themselves. Every Thanksgiving, we get together with about 20 people at a cousin’s house near New Orleans. And Every Christmas, we get together with another set of cousins, rotating dinners between McComb and Metairie, La. All the kids come in and it’s a great time.
For me, the annual dread comes from the extra workplace hassles involved in advance of the holidays.
When work is concerned, a holiday just gets in the way. It interrupts the routine of the week, requiring things to be done in advance or not at all.
A good example recently was Veterans Day, which this year was on Saturday. The U.S. Mail does not deliver on federal holidays, so there was no Saturday paper. I’m sure that subscribers understood, but I still hate that people didn’t get a weekend paper.
Thanksgiving always has been the most demanding holiday. In the 1980s and 1990s, when I was in the news department, we had to complete two papers in one day.
On Wednesday morning, the day before Thanksgiving, we would finish that day’s paper, print it at 11:30 and have our carriers deliver it.
Then, right away, we would start working on the Thanksgiving Day edition. It would print Wednesday night and be delivered either then or on Thursday morning.
And these papers had a lot of pages, too. You had to have a lot of stories and pictures ready to go. It was a tough day.
As the editor, I was less involved with completing the individual pages of the Thanksgiving edition, but had to make sure that the papers got out on time, and that the other papers we print each week also got done in advance.
Many times on Thanksgiving Eve the last 15 years, I was at work until 10 p.m. or midnight. That was not a great lead-in to having an enjoyable holiday, but you get used to it and deal with it.
Which brings me to Thanksgiving 2023. It’s no news flash to announce that the newspaper business has changed immensely in the last few years, and one of the biggest changes is that far fewer advertisers print circulars for readers to see what’s on sale for Black Friday.
A lot of that business has moved to the internet, which I understand. And one of our larger customers, the Hammond Daily Star, switched to another printer this past spring, lightening our workload this week even more.
Sure enough, that is exactly how it played out. I can report that this week was by far the least hectic Thanksgiving in decades for me.
The most circulars that any print customer had was five. By comparison, one edition in 2019 had 23 inserts for the day before Thanksgiving.
This year, the Enterprise-Journal’s paper on the day before Thanksgiving had three inserts. It wasn’t too long ago that our Thanksgiving Day paper had 10 to 13 inserts every year.
Everything went according to plan. Our print customers got their pages to us on time, the mailroom was ready to go with the circulars, and things were shockingly normal.
There were some thunderstorms last Monday night, which was our busiest printing day of the week, but the electricity stayed on and the work got done as planned.
My 2023 Thanksgiving annoyance did not occur until 1:30 a.m. Friday, when I called my kids John and Audrey to see why they had not returned from New Orleans.
It was because they were traveling in John’s Tesla, and did not recharge the battery as much as they should have. The battery ran out at the Fernwood exit, and I had to go fetch them from the Love’s Travel Center parking lot.
A few hours later, John got his car towed to the Tesla recharging station on Delaware Avenue, and all was right with the world.
But this worry-free holiday bothers me. It’s not so much that the paper is bringing in less money, though that is true.
I am just not accustomed to such an easy Thanksgiving. It’s weird. Like so much else in this changing world, I simply shall have to get used to it.
