Someday at Christmas

Vol. 1, Christmas Day Issue | December 25, 2025 – A gap tooth smile. A bottle of mustard sauce. The gift a stranger gave me on Christmas Day.

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Beauford Delaney, Can Fire in the Park, 1946. Image Credit: Smithsonian American Art Museum

Christmas Day 2001.

I just wanted to get through the day.

I was four months into the job I’d dreamed of. Most of the edit bays were dark.

Someone from the previous shift had left grocery store cookies on the satellite desk. No one touched them.

I knew the day would be a masquerade.

So when my family called, I heard everyone gathered. Laughed at the right moments. Told them I was fine.

We hung up. And I went back to work.

One of the supervisors made his way over. Wide, gap tooth smile.

“Where are you from,” he asked.

Jacksonville, I told him.

His smile got wider.

My face grew flush. Then tears.

We talked. High schools first. Where you went tells a story. Then college—if you went to a Florida school, that just builds on what your high school story already says.

We laughed. Talked about his grandfather’s restaurant. Open since 1957. The mustard sauce. We joked about wishing we could eat chicken that didn’t taste like wood that day.

“You’re going to be okay,” he said.

He didn’t ask.

And I believed him.

When he left, I thought about when I was too small to see over the counter at the restaurant. Miss Mikki would hand my mother her order. Half chicken. Red butcher paper. Mild sauce. On the side.

We had their chicken and ribs after a middle school concert. On Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. Between Christmas and New Year’s.

He went home after his shift. Told his mother he’d met a young woman from home.

She heard my name and gasped.

She’d worked at Continental Cablevision. Remembered my shows. The teenager producing weekly programs, trying to find her voice.

At the end of last summer, he messaged me.

The restaurant was closing.

It made the local news. Days of coverage. Friends posted photos of stockpiled sauce bottles. A friend in New York—from Jacksonville—asked me to bring bottles when I visited home.

Yesterday, I sat at a red light. Edgewood and U.S. 1. Empty parking lot. No smoke billowing. No line. No one walking out, arms full with brown paper bags, red butcher paper bulging out of them.

Tonight, we'll have ribs. We'll use the last bottle of mustard sauce. I'll think about that gap tooth smile. Being told I'd be okay. And believing it.

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