Little Eschatons

On Christmas Eves at the Mall

Photo by Kleomenis Spyroglou on Unsplash

Christmas Eve was always one of the weirdest days of the year.

When I was in college, I worked a few jobs to help make ends meet. One of those was working at the mall nearby, in a furniture store. If you have ever seen the chunky couches, chairs, and bunk beds that are endemic to summer camps and dorm rooms—the ones made of straight thick planks of pine and adorned with blocky cushions—then you know the store where I worked. The company had a showroom in the Asheville Mall, across from the pretzel shop and a luggage store. I worked for six dollars an hour plus commission, which combined usually worked out to exactly six dollars an hour, because I was a terrible salesperson. The two other employees at the store—a perpetually-frazzled manager and a woman about my age—were both far better at closing the deal. The young woman (whose name I have since forgotten) was especially skilled at selling bunk beds and end tables; people would stroll by, glance in at the displays, and a half an hour later be applying for store credit for their three thousand dollars worth of furniture.

I was bad at it, so I didn’t get paid much, but I didn’t mind, because it was a pretty easy place to work. Compared to my previous job waiting tables at Olive Garden, the furniture store was simple. There was no uniform to wear, we closed at 9 instead of 11, and mostly I stood around or did my homework while waiting on something to happen, instead of dashing from table to kitchen to table to bar, taking people giant bowls of salad or a new beer. I liked to rearrange the displays in my spare time; the other two employees let me do it because I had a knack. The girls at the pretzel store across the hall would give me free food. Once or twice a night someone I knew would stop by to chat, and most nights Jessa was working a few hallways away at the kids’ clothing store. It wasn’t a bad way to make six dollars an hour, commission or not.

Christmas Eve was the weirdest night to work. Having not grown up going to the mall much, but hearing stories about Black Friday and mall traffic and holiday shopping, I had imagined that the mall would be crowded with shoppers on Christmas Eve. Instead, it was mostly deserted. All the stores ran a skeleton crew, mostly of the youngest and lowest-paid workers who couldn’t dictate their own schedules, and the usual mall crowds were very thin. This was the late ‘90s, when malls were still a commercial and cultural juggernaut, but on Christmas Eve, most folks found something else to do—church, family, or travel—and the mall was eerily quiet.

The few people who did come to the mall that night were frantic. Inevitably, they had a list of people they needed to buy presents for, but they were hopelessly behind, and so they ended up at the mall at 7:15 on Christmas Eve. They would dash into the store breathless, realize that they couldn’t really gift someone a solid pine hutch the next day, and begin to move on. My job was to hold them long enough to sell them on one of our accessories—a lamp, a small mirror, bookends—that kind of thing. Most of the time, on most days, people were not that susceptible to my suggestions. “This sofa will last forever,” I would insist, as they walked out of the store. But on Christmas Eve, they were buying. They desperately wanted to buy, and they clung to any idea you could throw at them that might make plausible sense. Sure, I can give my niece a throw pillow tomorrow. Yes, my husband will love this set of coat hooks!

As Christmas Eve night wore on, the thin crowds grew thinner. People found what they were looking for, and they filtered out into the night to wrap things up and put them under the tree, their duty to the economy having been fulfilled. My commission for the things that sold on Christmas Eve was negligible; you had to sell a $1800 bunk bed set to really see any money from it. But I loved the weird energy of the night—the strange combination of emptiness and frantic panic. There was a feeling like something was unraveling or pending, but it wasn’t clear what. At 9:00, all the shops rolled down their metal gates and all the mall workers drove to wherever Christmas was going to be the next day, but until then we were all in a bizarre club together, standing watch over a small-scale End Times.

The only other time things felt like that was when the company went out of business. That happened in the spring of 2000, just as I was preparing to quit anyway, in preparation to graduate and get married. There had been signs for a while—ominous visits from the regional manager, an older woman named Elaine, who brought cryptic signals from corporate headquarters that things weren’t going well. Shipments were taking longer and longer to arrive, as if the company wasn’t paying its vendors well, and there was talk of layoffs. One day the word came, unceremonious and final: we were going out of business. Everything must go. We ran a few weeks of sales. First came 20% off everything. Then it was 50% and 75%, and by the end, we were selling the fixtures and our desk in the back room and the leftover dot matrix printer paper. It was chaotic and apocalyptic and I loved it. Those weeks still inform my sense of how it will feel when the world ends, whenever that happens: descending scavengers, lots of storytelling, and the heady buzz of time running out.

Christmas Eve was like a small version of that—a little eschaton. Every year energy and the pressure ramped up until it all pressed against the walls of one night in December, and the mall was one of the release valves. Santa and his elves down by the smoothie bar were acting like kids on the last night of summer camp, the CD store was emptied out, and the girls at the pretzel place wore green and red and brought over several of the leftover pretzels. At the furniture place we were slinging the last of the accessories and trying to leave right at 9:00. Nobody wanted to be the last one to leave and turn out the lights.