By John Eckberg
The Cincinnati Enquirer

While most Tristate residents will spend today surrounded by family and holiday cheer, Brenda Harris will instead be at work at Belterra Resort and Casino.

Around her will be a loose-knit collection of newfound friends - at least, that's the way it went last year when she had the same shift at the casino near Vevay, Ind.

"I like working Christmas Day," says the 22-year-old staffer in the Champion's Club, where she issues cards for special promotions.

"I've found that everybody is in the Christmas spirit that day. You have an older generation. Maybe their family has moved away or their kids have moved away. So they come and spend it with us."

For many local workers, glad tidings will include Christmas duty on a job that the rest of us may take for granted.

Police officers, firefighters, bus drivers, post office workers, hospital staffers, water and sewer maintenance workers, store clerks and tow truck drivers are among the occupations that require dedication, commitment and an occasional yuletide grind.

Gray's Towing driver John Quigley works the Christmas 6 am to noon shift. (Michael Snyder photo)

Glad to see you

Nothing says Christmas like a tattooed tow truck driver.

Working on the holiday is "really not that bad," says John Quigley, 28, who drives a flat-bed tow truck for Gray's Towing in Mount Carmel. He expects to get a call or two from somebody who locked the keys in the ignition while the car was warming up or maybe there will be some dead battery calls.

The Glen Este High School graduate has worked every Christmas shift since he joined the company four years ago, and that is not unusual because everybody at Gray's Towing works at least a partial shift for Christmas.

As for Christmas cheer, nobody has much of it in a family that has a car brimming with presents but can't make the trip to Grandma's house because the car won't start.

"People are just happy to see you on a Christmas," says Gray's co-owner Rodney Gray, a 43-year-old Milford resident. "They call and never thought they'd ever get anybody. It's like it's the cavalry showing up."

Last year 375 calls for roadside assistance came into dispatchers for the American Automobile Association of Cincinnati on Christmas Day. That's a slow day, according to Sandra Guile, public relations coordinator for the travel and roadside assistance club, which has 360,000 members in the region.

"For some, you are a hero when you get there," Quigley says.

'Baby time of year'

For nurse Dona Brock, heroism does not even enter into her picture of her job when she leaves her Madeira home at 6:20 a.m., bound for the neo-natal intensive care unit at Good Samaritan Hospital in University Heights, where she monitors babies.

After all, she says, Christmas is a "baby time of year."

"Any holiday I'm working, my family knows they're going to have to celebrate around my schedule, but that's an easy thing to do," said Brock.

Her husband, Roscoe Brock, agreed. "We realize it's part of the profession," he says, "that somebody has to do it - and it is just on some Christmases."

Brock believes she has the best job in the world with cooperative co-workers, a dedicated manager and, of course, the babies.

Making the best of it

That's a great example of how some people "make the best out of an already great situation," says Al Gini, a professor of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago and author of The Importance of Being Lazy: In Praise of Play, Leisure and Vacations (Routledge: $22.95) and My Job, My Self: Work and the Creation of the Modern Individual (Routledge: $18.95).

Working on a holiday creates a bond in the workplace because most people don't work in neo-natal care but still must try to "make the best out of a bad situation."

Gini says we should not forget the stewards who work on Christmas at a job that others simply do not want to do: "We tend to forget, whether a holiday or a holy day, we tend to forget ... the work that must be done."

Get it there today

Today is still not too late for Christmas delivery, says Rick Collett, 51, a Covington resident, who will work an 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. shift out of the Mid-city Carrier Station in Cincinnati for the U.S. Postal Service.

He will be delivering express mail, "and anything else that looks like a Christmas present. It's the one day of the year when we see people when we deliver the presents. You actually get to see some kids' faces light up."

About two tractor-trailers of mail will be delivered today.

Lillian Murphy, LPN, of Colerain Township resident, heard her alarm today at 5:10 a.m. and by 7 a.m. she was on the job at Drake Center in Hartwell, where she is responsible for the medical care of about a dozen patients, perhaps as many as 19.

She will not be done in time for Christmas dinner at her sister's house in West Chester - the home of Joyce Christian - but she does have some expectations about the day and can sum up those expectations in one word:

"Leftovers," she said.

"To me working Christmas Day is an opportunity to share the day with my Drake family. Between my patients and the people I work with, well, it becomes like a family, a personal part of my Christmas."

So, too, for Linda Neil, a North Avondale resident who will be at First Step Home, a Walnut Hills long-term residential program for women, who have substance abuse issues, and for their children, too.

"It definitely has a Christmas feel," she says. "We have a home setting so it doesn't feel like you're at work, not even when you're in the office."

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E-mail jeckberg@enquirer.com