The Saddest Christmas I Ever Spent Was in Omaha

I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for me, but I need you to understand that I don’t think you’ve ever been as sad as I was on my first Christmas as a flight attendant.

I know that sounds dramatic. It is dramatic. It is also true.

My dad once told me about a Christmas when I was maybe seven or eight years old, and the only thing I really, really wanted was one of those outdoor playhouses. You know the ones I’m talking about: thick Fisher-Price plastic, primary colors, little door that opened and closed, windows that articulated, probably a little fake kitchenette inside where a tiny girl could host tiny imaginary dinner parties for her dolls and stuffed animals and maybe a deeply unwilling pet cat. It was the kind of toy that felt like a whole world when you were a kid. A house of your own. A place to be in charge. Very aspirational. Very House Hunters: Preschool Edition.

My parents did not get it for me. Not because they didn’t want to give it to me. Because they literally could not afford it. And when my dad told me this years later, he described how pathetic and disappointed my poor little face looked when I realized I wasn’t getting it. He said it with that specific kind of dad sadness that comes from remembering the exact moment you could not give your kid the magic they asked for, and every time I think about it, it breaks my heart a little bit. Not even because I didn’t get the playhouse. I have survived, clearly. But because I can imagine what it must have felt like for him to see that disappointment land on my sweet little face and not be able to fix it.

I need you to picture that face. Poor, sweet, seven-or-eight-year-old Maigen. Downcast. Trying to be good about it. Trying not to make anyone feel worse. But absolutely, visibly crushed in the way only children can be crushed by Christmas disappointment, because when you are little, Christmas is supposed to be the one day the universe bends toward magic. (I was a pretty adorable kid for a while there, so that sad face had to cut deep.)

Now take that same energy and put it on a 27-year-old woman in polyester wool blend, stuck in an aging airport hotel in Omaha, Nebraska, on Christmas night with no food.

That was me. Pathetic.

It was 2008, my first year as a flight attendant, and because I was brand new, I had the seniority of a decorative airline magazine tucked into a seatback pocket. I did not have power or leverage or any semblance of control over my holiday schedule. I had an assignment, a suitcase, a uniform, and the kind of fresh-faced optimism that had not yet been beaten out of me by irregular operations, airport food prices, and the emotional violence of being assigned a flight departing Newark at dawn.

That year, I was on Access Days for Christmas.

If you haven’t read my explanation of Access Days yet, the short version is this: six days a month, Delta had access to me 24/7. Not in a creepy way. In a scheduling way. Although, honestly, depending on how much you value personal autonomy, it could feel a little creepy. These were the days where the company could send you wherever they needed you, with very little notice, because someone called out, timed out, missed a commute, got sick, got stuck, got reassigned, or because the airline gods were bored and wanted to see what happened if they pushed a few more buttons.

We got our schedules about a month ahead of time, so by late November I knew I was on call for Christmas. I tried to trade it. Of course I tried to trade it. I may have been junior, but I wasn’t stupid. Unfortunately, everyone else also had eyes and a family and a basic understanding of what Christmas is, so nobody was exactly racing to take my holiday on-call days out of the goodness of their heart. There is no “Christmas Spirit” button in the crew scheduling system.

So I accepted my fate, by which I mean I complained about it and then showed up anyway.

The night before Christmas, or technically heading into the Christmas on-call block, I got assigned airport standby at LaGuardia. Sitting standby is its own specific flavor of purgatory. You are dressed. You are packed. You are physically present at the airport. You are being paid, but not enough to make it feel like a good deal. You are waiting to see whether your day becomes nothing or becomes something very suddenly. It’s like being a contestant on a game show where the prize might be “go home” or it might be “congratulations, you’re going to Denver, Atlanta, and then Omaha, hope you packed socks.”

I did not pack correctly.

This is the part where future Maigen looks back at baby flight attendant Maigen and wants to gently take her by the shoulders and say, “Sweetheart, angel, light of my life, what exactly did you think was going to happen here?”

Apparently, for this particular Access Days block, I had not adequately packed food. I don’t know why. This is not like me later in my career, when I traveled like a raccoon preparing for winter and had oatmeal, protein bars, camping soup, candy, tuna packets, tea bags, crackers, and some ancient emergency Butterfinger wedged into the structural foundation of my suitcase. But at this point? I was still learning. I assumed that between LaGuardia, Denver, Atlanta, and a reasonably large city like Omaha, surely I would be able to find a meal at some point.

That assumption was adorable. (“And don’t call me Shirley.” <— if you get this joke, have you been screened for colon cancer?)

As you might imagine, someone called out “sick,” and I put that in quotes not because I know they were lying, but because it was Christmas and I am not an idiot. I got assigned a three-day trip with three legs on the first day: LaGuardia to Denver, Denver to Atlanta, Atlanta to Omaha. This is not exactly a cozy sleigh ride through a winter wonderland. This is the kind of routing that makes you stare at the schedule and go, “Ah, so today we are being punished by geography…and weather.”

The one genuinely sweet thing I remember from the whole day happened on one of those flights. There was a handsome man who was supposed to sit in first class, and he asked if his mom could take his seat while he sat in her coach seat instead. And I am telling you right now, that is the kind of behavior that makes a flight attendant immediately fall a little bit in love with you. Not in a serious way. Not in a “let’s build a life together” way. In a “sir, who raised you and are there more at home?” kind of way.

I made sure he had free drinks the whole flight. I don’t think he took me up on more than a couple, because apparently he was both handsome and moderate, which is irritatingly attractive, but I promise you I made my interest known in whatever clumsy new-flight-attendant way I had available to me. Did I have a plan? Absolutely not. I was 27 and emotionally running on Delta cookies and possibility. He was just the only bright note I remember in a day that was otherwise about to become a tiny Midwestern Dickens novel.

We landed in Omaha around 4 p.m. on Christmas Day.

It was snowing.

And listen, in any other context, light flaky snow on Christmas evening might have felt charming. Festive, even. The kind of snow that makes you think of warm windows, yellow lamplight, someone’s grandmother pulling something buttery out of the oven, and maybe a dog wearing a plaid bow for no reason. Delightful. But I was not walking into a cozy family Christmas. I was walking into an airport shuttle in uniform, underfed, underprepared, and rapidly discovering that Nebraska cold has no manners.

The snow was already piled up, but it wasn’t icy. It was just cold and soft and falling lightly in that way that would have been pretty if I had not been deeply aware that I owned neither appropriate winter layering nor a plan for dinner. I remember being shocked by the cold. I had grown up in the South. I had lived in New York by then, yes, but there is a specific middle-of-the-country winter cold that feels like it is not touching your skin so much as entering into a legal dispute with your bones. Some people call those states “the square states in the middle,” and I mean that with love, but y’all are not playing around with weather. (Its very: thanks, I hate it.)

We got to the hotel and checked in around 5:15. In my memory, it was an Embassy Suites, though I would not bet my life on that. What I do remember is green carpet. Not fresh green carpet. Not “we just renovated and made a bold design choice” green carpet. More like older hotel green carpet with a pattern doing the kind of heavy lifting hotel hallway carpets have been doing since the dawn of commercial lodging. The kind of carpet where you don’t look too closely because the pattern is clearly there for legal and psychological reasons. The hotel itself wasn’t gross exactly. It wasn’t one of those places where you walk in and immediately wonder if your immune system signed a waiver. It was just tired. Dinged baseboards. Older fixtures. A lobby that had probably looked pretty nice once, back when people wore travel blazers unironically and smoking sections still existed in everyone’s recent memory.

Everyone on the crew slam-clicked.

If you don’t know what slam-clicking is, it’s exactly what it sounds like. You get to the hotel, you go to your room, the door slams, the lock clicks, and no one sees you again until van time. On some layovers, the crew wants to go out. On others, everyone disappears like they owe someone money. This was Christmas in Omaha, and nobody was trying to manufacture a found-family moment in the lobby over lukewarm tea. At least one of the flight attendants actually lived in Omaha, so they went home to their real family and left us like a person with options. The rest of us vanished into the stillness of that sad hotel.

I got to my room, put down my suitcase, and realized I had nothing to eat.

Nothing.

The hotel restaurant was closed because, of course, it was Christmas. I don’t remember if there were vending machines. If there were, either they had nothing useful or I had lost the will to search. No nearby restaurants were open. No delivery (this was before DoorDash and GrubHub and UberEats, remembe). No airport food tucked into my bag. No protein bar. No sad emergency oatmeal. No little packet of peanut butter. Not even a granola bar that had been smashed flat by my flight attendant manual. I had somehow, against all the wisdom of travelers before me, arrived at a Christmas Day layover with no food.

That was the moment the sad really hit.

Not cute sad. Not “aw, poor me” sad. Not the sort of melancholy you can romanticize later over a candle and a glass of wine. This was stomach-empty, hotel-room-quiet, snow-falling-outside, everyone-else-is-with-their-people sad. The kind of sad where the overhead lights in the room feel offensive. The kind of sad where you sit on the edge of the bed in your pantyhose and uniform skirt and think, “Oh. So this is Christmas.”

I called my dad.

My family had already done Christmas. They had opened stockings. They had exchanged gifts. They had eaten already, and had moved through the peak festive part of the day and into that soft winding-down phase where everybody is full and relaxed and the wrapping paper is in trash bags and someone is probably half-watching a movie they’ve seen fifteen times. Their Christmas had happened. Mine was a hotel room in Omaha with green hallway carpet and no dinner.

I tried to sound fine.

Obviously I tried to sound fine. That is what you do when you are sad but do not want to make other people sad about your sadness. You put a little brightness in your voice. You say things like, “No, it’s okay,” and “I’m fine,” and “It’s just one Christmas,” while actively not being fine because your throat is doing that tight thing and your eyes are threatening to fill with hot, blurring tears.

My dad could tell. Dads can sometimes hear the thing you are not saying, especially when the thing you are not saying is, “I am lonely and hungry and I wish I were home.” I don’t remember exactly what he said, and maybe that’s because the words weren’t the point. I just remember the feeling of being on the phone with him, trying to be a grown woman about it, while some part of me was very much still that little girl who didn’t get the playhouse.

The emotional math of that moment was so stupid and so real. I was an adult. I had chosen this job. I had wanted adventure. I had wanted motion. I had wanted a life that did not look like everyone else’s. And here it was. The life I had chosen. A layover in Omaha. No dinner. Snow. Christmas. A closed hotel restaurant. Congratulations, baby, you got out of South Carolina and now you’re crying in Nebraska.

To be clear, I survived.

This is not a story about actual deprivation. I was not in danger. A thirteen-hour layover in Omaha without food is survivable. Annoying. Sad. Deeply avoidable. But survivable. Still, in the moment, I felt absolutely crushed. I was hungry enough that my body was starting to get dramatic about it, and lonely enough that my feelings had formed a committee. I probably took off my uniform, crawled into bed, and tried to sleep as early as possible because being unconscious is one way to skip dinner if you have no better options.

The next morning, we left so early the hotel restaurant still wasn’t open. Not even a meager yogurt cup available. Rude.

By the time we got back to the airplane, I was feral. Not “a little peckish.” Not “could use a snack.” FERAL. I tore into those airplane snacks like Tom Hanks opening FedEx boxes in Cast Away. Peanuts. Pretzels. Biscoff cookies. I did not care. I had never been so grateful to see a ginger ale in my life. That first carbonated sip probably had the emotional impact of a four-course meal. I was revived by tiny packaged carbohydrates and legumes.

And that, right there, was the lesson: I never traveled without food again. Never.

For the rest of my flying career, I had something in my suitcase. At minimum, a packet of oatmeal. Usually a freeze-dried camping soup that only needed hot water and a willingness to pretend it tasted better than it did. Granola bars. Crackers. Tea. Candy. That aforementioned full-size Butterfinger that I always kept buried somewhere in my luggage like an emergency flare made of sugar and peanut butter. As a direct result of this experience, I became the kind of person who could survive a closed airport, a snowstorm, a delayed van, a surprise reroute, a hotel with no restaurant, and a holiday where everyone else had gone home to people who loved them.

Because the glamour of being a flight attendant is real sometimes. It is Rome on your birthday. It is champagne in Times Square. It is flirting with a drummer in first class and ending up backstage at Madison Square Garden . But the unglamorous part is real too. It is sitting alone on a hotel bed in Omaha on Christmas night, hungry and trying not to cry into the phone because your dad can already hear it.

And honestly, that is probably the more useful part of the story.

Not every magical life moment arrives looking magical. Sometimes the thing that changes you is a sad little Christmas in a tired hotel room with green carpet and no dinner, teaching you a practical lesson you will carry forever.

Pack snacks. Always pack snacks.