Christmas

Christmas operates in the book as more than a holiday date: it is the deadline that draws seasonal workers into warehouses, ends their temporary employment, and sends many of them back onto the road. At the same time, among vehicle-dwelling travelers, it becomes an occasion for meals and companionship assembled outside conventional homes and family routines. The contrast is especially clear in Linda May’s first winter with Amazon CamperForce, when the holiday arrives amid warehouse strain, loneliness, and a growing sense of independence.

A holiday that organizes seasonal work

Amazon hires CamperForce workers to help meet the shipping surge of its peak season, the three or four months before Christmas. The program gathers nomadic workers at fulfillment centers, including the one near Fernley, Nevada. Many travel hundreds of miles for temporary work, and some are in their sixties or seventies. Their jobs are physically demanding: shifts can last ten hours or more, with workers walking miles across concrete while scanning, sorting, and boxing merchandise. Once the holiday rush ends, the program ends too, and its workers leave in a departing line that managers call a taillight parade.

The Christmas calendar also reaches well beyond the warehouse. Workampers take seasonal jobs selling pumpkins for Halloween, fireworks for the Fourth of July, and Christmas trees during the winter. In 2012, seventy-seven-year-old David Roderick and his wife sold trees at the San Mateo Event Center while living in their fifteen-year-old Lazy Daze RV. For six days each week, they carried conifers as tall as nine feet and lifted them onto customers’ vehicles, working eight to ten hours a day. The cheerful promise of holiday sales thus rests on strenuous work, often performed by older people whose retirement security has been diminished. Christmas creates a brief labor market, but the season’s end does not provide lasting security.

The warehouse Christmas

During Linda May’s first CamperForce season, the approach of Christmas intensified pressure inside the warehouse. Merchandise filled the storage bins beyond capacity; workers searching for space had to wait for their scanners to register that a bin could not accept another item, while supervisors urged them to keep up their rates. On Cyber Monday, the first Monday after Thanksgiving, customers ordered about 36.8 million products. The company’s record holiday sales made visible the extraordinary volume of goods moving through the warehouse, while workers experienced that volume as crowded shelves, repetitive tasks, and demands to move faster.

Linda had volunteered to stay at the warehouse through December 30, hoping to earn as much as possible. By then, after more than four months on the overnight shift, the work had left her bored and numb, and repeated scanning had caused pain in her right wrist. Some workers made sense of their labor by imagining themselves as Santa’s helpers sending gifts and joy outward. Linda did not share that interpretation. She felt more like a cog in a vast vending machine and wanted distance from the holiday after seeing so much merchandise. When the warehouse closed for Christmas, she spent the day alone in her RV, resting. The pause was not a festive celebration so much as a brief cessation of the routine that had consumed her nights.

Christmas nevertheless marks a change in Linda’s first year of mobile work. She had completed two seasonal jobs, camp hosting and CamperForce, and made it through roughly half a year of frugal, nomadic living. The achievement gave her a measure of pride and self-sufficiency, even as the holiday itself had left her emotionally detached. With the warehouse season winding down, she set out for warmer weather and the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous in Quartzsite, Arizona, looking for the community she and other travelers sometimes called a vanily. For Linda, the end of Christmas work opened onto another kind of seasonal gathering.

The desert as an alternative holiday home

Among nomads, Christmas could be made collectively rather than organized around a permanent house or a single household. One gathering near Interstate 10 in California brought together more than a dozen vehicles, with inhabitants ranging from their twenties to their seventies. They shared a fifteen-pound turkey, deboned and halved before being cooked on two portable grills, along with mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, and two kinds of pie. The meal’s preparation and scale matter: it was a holiday dinner assembled with limited equipment in an open desert landscape, and its company came from a network of fellow travelers rather than a conventional neighborhood.

In Quartzsite, Christmas Eve brought a couple dozen people together for a potluck. Linda met Charlene Swankie there for the first time. The gathering included small, improvised holiday gestures: a snowman made from stones with a carrot for a nose, and plans among friends to travel to Los Algodones. Linda hoped to join them but first needed to renew her expired driver’s license and obtain a passport. The holiday thus sat within the practical details of life on the road—documents, travel plans, and the need to keep a vehicle-based life moving—as much as within ceremony.

On Christmas morning, Kyndal and her husband handed out small gifts of handy wipes decorated with bows and candies. Linda, in turn, made a special breakfast for LaVonne Ellis: pumpkin pancakes with cranberry sauce, an idea suggested by Charlene Swankie. These modest exchanges gave the day its shape. The gifts were useful as well as festive, and the meal depended on one traveler cooking for another. In a mobile community, Christmas could be expressed through attention to specific people and the resources at hand rather than through the purchase of a large number of presents.

Mutual aid and the meaning of the season

The holiday gatherings belong to a broader pattern of reciprocal care among travelers. At the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, participants offered one another skills, food, tools, and practical assistance without making every exchange a formal transaction. At sunrise, Lesa NeSmith made cowboy coffee for anyone who came by with a cup, extending an older habit of welcoming neighbors into a shared morning. Communal meals, including chili and soup dinners to which people contributed ingredients, made the gathering’s hospitality tangible. This context helps explain why a desert Christmas could feel like a family occasion: its bonds were built through repeated acts of sharing rather than assumed through kinship alone.

That support continued beyond the holiday itself. In the weeks after the gatherings, Linda became so ill with bronchitis that she was too weak to cook in the Squeeze Inn, her small vehicle. Nearby nomads brought her food, including boiled eggs, tomatoes, and sausage. Such care was not unique to Linda; other travelers had organized help for an injured member of their community while she recovered. The scenes do not erase the instability of seasonal employment or the isolation of living without conventional housing. They show instead how the holiday’s temporary gathering could connect to a more durable network of practical support.

Christmas therefore carries two sharply different rhythms in the book. In the warehouse, it is the approaching deadline behind a commercial surge, a period of relentless scanning that leaves Linda alienated from the goods she helps send out. On the road, it is an occasion travelers adapt to their circumstances: a shared turkey, a potluck, small useful gifts, and breakfast made for a friend. For Linda, the season ends not with a settled homecoming but with the completion of her first long stretch of workamping and a journey toward warmer weather and community. The holiday exposes the difference between producing abundance for distant customers and making a sense of belonging from what fellow travelers can share.