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Working Through the Holidays: 3 Tips for Success

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working through the holidays

The end-of-year holiday season is a difficult time for truckers, as many of them are on the road and away from families. While the traditional office job may come with a week’s vacation for Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year’s, truck drivers don’t always have that luxury. Americans have spent well over $500 million during the holiday season each of the last five years, and that trend isn’t expected to change. This translates to more truck drivers working tirelessly on the road to deliver freight like holiday gifts and merchandise. With the added pressure to work, it can be tricky for drivers to spend time with family and do holiday shopping of their own. If you’re a truck driver working through the holidays, here are 3 tips for success.

Tip 1: Don’t overwork!

Drivers are more likely to overwork and overextend themselves during this time of year. As carriers are pressed hard over the holidays, they’ll incentivize or pressure you to work more. The potential of making extra cash can be very tempting, especially when you see fellow drivers making the same decision.

Be careful about spreading yourself too thin and overworking during this special time of year!

Becoming a workaholic is a constant danger for truckers, but the holidays are an especially bad time to do it. If you overwork now, you’ll risk either not seeing your family as much, or being exhausted when you finally do spend time together.

Exhaustion and fatigue won’t help you or your carrier either, as you’ll be more likely to make a mistake. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t take advantage of opportunities to deliver a few more runs and make some extra cash. Just make sure you are comfortable with the home time you’re giving up for it. Work-life balance involves trade-offs and sacrificing family time can be tough if you’re working through the holidays. Take on extra work with moderation and balance in mind.

Tip 2: Use technology to your advantage

For drivers who will be working through the holidays, there isn’t much extra time for holiday shopping. Using your phone or mobile device can be an excellent way to stay on top of the holiday shopping list. With online shopping sales soaring over during the season, many consumers don’t need to spend time visiting stores. For drivers working over the road, you can easily spend five or ten minutes browsing sites like Amazon, eBay, or Target for your gift-giving needs.

Mobile technology can also help you stay in touch with family and loved ones if you’re on the road many days at a time. Use popular video messaging apps like FaceTime or Skype to add a personal touch to your calls home. Many other apps allow you to create custom holiday cards and messages to send across the country. Finally, you can use music streaming services like Spotify or Pandora to listen to holiday music while on the road. Just because you’re away from home doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bask in the holiday spirit. You can share the same tunes and tracks with family members, which will help you feel even more connected to them.

Tip 3: Don’t seek perfection

Sometimes the holidays bring out not just our better qualities, but some of our worse instincts as well. Seeking the perfect holiday is one of them. Aiming for perfection while working through the holidays is a recipe for disaster. Remember that if you’re spending time with family, it’s less important what you do together than just being there in the first place.

This may be a good time to remember all the lessons from the classic Christmas movies we grew up watching. Whether it’s the story of the Grinch, Ebeneezer Scrooge, or It’s a Wonderful Life, they all teach us that it’s the simple things in life that make the holidays worth it. The holiday spirit and cheer come from being good to others and spending time with loved ones – not from perfect gifts or celebrations.

Don’t seek the perfect holiday celebration, the perfect gift, or even the perfect amount of home time.

Since your work-life balance will require trade-offs, there’s no way you can have it all during the holidays. So instead of fighting it, embrace it and enjoy the holidays for what they are. Your family and loved ones will remember the quality time you spent together, and not care about the rest.

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Santa calls on truckers to help deliver Christmas gifts

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deliver christmas gifts

Image via @billweavermusic

Owner-operator and songwriter Bill Weaver released a holiday song about how Santa calls on truckers to help deliver Christmas gifts.

His song, How the Truckers Saved Christmas, tells of how Santa was pulled over by the DOT, and called on “a thousand long-haul drivers” to cover his run that night. Then, the tune goes on to tell how hard all truck drivers worked hard to deliver Christmas gifts.

They receive a special “thank you” gift from Santa in the form of a thermos of coffee, “the keys to a brand new Pete and special set of studded snow tires.” However, the DOT got a different kind of gift.

In addition, Weaver released his last hit last song, “Burnin’ the Old School Down”, this past summer.

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3 Great Ways Truckers Help Truckers at the Holidays

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As Santa well knows, it’s nice to receive at the holidays—but it’s even better to give. Truckers, it turns out, give as well as anyone at the holidays. Here are three trucker groups or individuals that go above and beyond during the holiday season, spreading Christmas cheer in big ways and small.

Stockings for Truckers  has delivered more than 4,000 stockings and 3,200 meals to truckers since its inception four years ago.

Founded by trucker wife Heather Bair, Stockings for Truckers is a lifeline for truckers who find themselves on the road at the holidays. Volunteers are truckers’ husbands, wives, mothers and grandmothers.

Volunteers can choose whether they want to cook homemade meals or create stockings filled with personal necessities, treats and gift cards. Volunteers pay for the goods themselves and distribute them at truck stops. Each stocking contains a hand-written Christmas card for truckers as well.

“Truckers don’t get enough recognition,” says volunteer Heather Nelson, who rides along in the truck with her boyfriend. “This is our way of saying thank you.”

As an added treat, Stockings for Truckers distributes stockings to each person in the truck and offers special stockings for diabetics and pets.

“It puts a big smile on everyone’s face,” Nelson says. “Some people get emotional. They break down crying, because truck drivers aren’t used to being recognized in a good way.”

Meals for Truckers

Raised on a farm, Teddi Dunson has been driving trucks since age 14. She’s been giving back to the trucking community for nearly as long. Every year since 1977, Dunson has cooked Christmas dinner for nearby truckers, and she’s still cookin’ in 2016.

Dunson and her husband were team drivers themselves. For years, they hit the local truck stop on Christmas Day and brought truckers back to their home for a holiday feast. “Back then, drivers were more trusting of each other than they are today,” Dunson says.

Now 60, Dunson keeps the tradition alive, though she has changed the format a bit. She prepares a home-cooked Christmas meal for 30, plates it and distributes the meals at two truck stops by her home in Arkansas. “I put my Santa hat on and deliver the meals between noon and 2 p.m. on Christmas Day,” she says.

The plates are piled high with ham or turkey, stuffing, sweet potato casserole, vegetables, pumpkin pie and more.

It’s a lot of work, but Dunson has a good reason for preparing the feast.

“I do it because we’ve got a lot of drivers that don’t have a family to go home to on Christmas,” she says. “Or you have drivers who have families but they can’t make it in for Christmas. It’s depressing. I’ve continued the tradition all these years because it’s five minutes of a bright spot on Christmas Day (and I’m a pretty good cook).”

Truckers Christmas Group

In November 2008, a trucker named “Wonderful” Wayne Hortman had an idea to launch a trucker charity and posted about it on social media. According to the charity’s website, Hortman wrote: “Got to thinkin’ about Christmas. I like to help the needy. Thought maybe my fellow truckers might want to join me in setting up a fund right here on CDL for some trucker families that might be in need of having a good Christmas.”

The rest, as they say, is history. In the eight years since, Truckers Christmas Group has raised monetary donations for trucking families in need across North America. Truckers nominate families who would make good candidates (nomination forms are on the organization’s website), and the organization chooses recipients based on those nominations.

The group’s goal is to raise enough money to make a difference in the families’ lives at Christmastime. In addition to other fundraising measures, Truckers Christmas Group sells products on its website to raise funds. To date, the group has helped 125 trucking families with $73,000 in monetary donations. In 2016 alone, the charity distributed $7,000 in aid to 13 families.

What other great charities are you part of, truck drivers? We want to highlight all the good you’re doing! Connect with us here and tell us how you’re giving back.

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The Trucker Who’s Sprucing Up The Holiday One Load At A Time

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christmas-tree-farm

Before you tied your Christmas tree to the top of the car and carted it home, a truck driver worked to get it to the Christmas tree lot in the first place. John Reed is one of those drivers. He has been delivering Christmas trees for 15 years. “It’s just part of driving a truck every year,” says the veteran owner operator (and Drive My Way columnist).

When we spoke with Reed, he had just delivered a load of 640 Christmas trees from a farm in Washington state to a business in southern California. They ranged from 18-inch decorative trees to eight-foot conifer spruces.

Loading the trees in Washington state

Loading the trees in Washington state

“I always enjoy having the responsibility of transporting Christmas trees because I have an 11-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son and they love the holiday season,” Reed says. “They’re thinking about their Christmas lists and wondering if they’re going to get what they want. I really enjoy this time of year, and I get a lot of pleasure out of watching my kids.”

When Reed first began transporting Christmas trees, he got caught up in the festive holiday vibe easily.

Now, Reed happily brings the spirit of the season to people through his delivery. But, Christmas trees resemble his other loads—they just have to get there.

Unloading the trees in California

Unloading the trees in California

“After a couple years, you don’t think about it as much,” Reed says. “It runs just like a normal load would. It pays the same. For me, it’s just about keeping busy before the holidays.”

Reed hauls the trees in a dry van. They don’t travel with a water source because it usually takes only a day or two to transport them. But when Reed opens his trailer, the fresh scent of pine hits him hard. “It’s overwhelming sometimes,” he laughs.

For Reed, the Christmas trees are no-touch freight.

Workers at the Christmas tree farm load the trees into Reed’s truck and when he arrives at his delivery point, staff unloads them.

john-reed-trees-wrapped-up“I just have to sweep out my trailer really well because it’s full of pine needles when the trip is over,” Reed says.

As the longtime truck driver that he is, Reed can’t help but feel for his colleagues who won’t be able to spend the holidays with their families this year.

“The responsibility of delivering the essentials for everyday living sometimes gets in the way of the family bonding we all need for a healthy existence,” Reed says. “Let’s remember people who will be away from their families over the holidays and keep them in our prayers.”

Do you have a special load that gives your CDL trucking job a sense of purpose? Connect with us here and tell us about it for the chance to be featured in a Drive My Way story.

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