PHOENIX, AZ — The TSA confirmed Wednesday that Christmas Eve travel had reached an all-time record, with 3.1 million Americans voluntarily entering an airport at sunrise to fly toward people who will, within nine hours, ask why they aren’t married yet.
Sky Harbor’s C concourse, described by one passing custodian as ‘a mall food court but everyone is grieving,’ processed travelers at a rate not seen since the agency began tracking the metric, the holiday, or human suffering.
The record was set, officials said, somewhere between 6:14 a.m. and the moment a woman in Boarding Group 7 sat down on a Cinnabon napkin and began silently weeping into a Stanley cup that had, until very recently, contained a hot toddy she made in the cell phone lot.
‘We’re seeing extraordinary throughput,’ said Marcy Pell, a TSA shift lead at PHX who agreed to speak only if this newspaper acknowledged she had been awake since Tuesday. ‘Bin volume is up. Loose-Funko volume is up. The number of grown men trying to gate-check a wreath is, frankly, alarming.’
Industry analysts at Beacon Mobility — a transit research desk that, by its own admission, only exists three weeks a year — projected that 41 percent of today’s travelers were carrying a wrapped gift they had been told not to wrap, 28 percent were carrying a casserole the FAA does not legally recognize as food, and roughly 12 percent were already in an active text fight with a sibling about pickup.
At Hartsfield-Jackson, a Spirit gate agent reportedly looked at a boarding pass, looked at the passenger, looked back at the boarding pass, and quietly said ‘Merry Christmas’ in the tone people normally reserve for last rites. The passenger, identified only as a man transporting an unboxed air fryer in a CVS bag, nodded once and boarded.
Delays cascaded through the system in ways the agency described as ‘seasonally appropriate.’ A ground stop in Denver was attributed to weather. A ground stop in Charlotte was attributed to one (1) gentleman who insisted his emotional support beagle was named Doug and could ‘absolutely’ sit in 14B without a carrier. A ground stop in Newark was attributed to Newark.
By midmorning, the Cinnabon line at Terminal 4 had achieved what aviation officials are calling ‘critical mass,’ meaning it now had its own micro-climate, two informal leaders, and a man near the front explaining the airline industry to a woman who had not asked.
‘I just need to get to Buffalo,’ said one passenger, Trevor Aiken, 34, who was holding a poinsettia, a duffel bag, a child’s car seat containing no child, and a printed-out itinerary from 2019. ‘My mom said don’t bring anything. Then she said bring the good rolls. Then she said don’t bring the good rolls. I have the good rolls.’
The TSA, for its part, urged calm, patience, and the immediate removal of all liquids over 3.4 ounces, a category that this morning included gravy.
By 4 p.m. local time, the woman in Boarding Group 7 had reportedly stopped crying, boarded her flight, and was watching ‘The Holiday’ on a phone propped against a tin of homemade fudge — which, sources confirmed, she will not be sharing with the man in 22C, no matter how loudly he sighs.