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Jengiz Haas, RN (right), a visiting nurse for Sutter Visiting Nurses Association and Hospice in Emeryville, Calif., enjoys playing the accordion during the holidays for coworkers and patients.

When Jengiz Haas, RN, was a boy, his mother, a Brownie troop leader, used to drag him along on holiday caroling visits to a local nursing home in New Jersey. He accompanied the Brownies on his accordion as they sang seasonal tunes. Haas found he enjoyed the caroling and the joy it brought to the elderly residents. That experience, he tells people now, may have been the reason why he decided to become a nurse.

As a visiting nurse for Sutter Visiting Nurses Association and Hospice in Emeryville, Calif., Haas recreates the spirit of those caroling sessions by playing his accordion during the holidays for his coworkers and a few select patients he thinks will appreciate the music.

“I think Christmastime is when you want to do special things for people,” Haas says, even if those special things can’t be billed or may mean he spends more than his allotted time with a patient.

“Sometimes I think, ‘Should I really be doing this?’” he says. “But I do it.”

Not home for the holidays

The holidays, a festive, joyous time for most people, can be especially depressing for those who are sick. They may not seem much happier for health care workers who would rather be celebrating with their families and friends.

But some nurses delve deep into their creative and generous psyches to discover ways to make the holidays special for patients and coworkers, as NurseWeek discovered when we asked nurses to tell us their stories of holiday cheer. Their efforts were as elaborate as raising funds months in advance to buy toys for all the children in their hospital, or as simple as making a batch of homemade spicy popcorn to share with the family of a home care patient. All reported that whatever they did not only made their patients and coworkers smile, it also made their own holidays more meaningful.

“Christmas in the hospital is no fun for anybody,” says Jean Sharp, RN, of Bakersfield, Calif. Patients in the hospital at Christmas are usually really sick, she says, and staff members can be disgruntled. “No one wants to work on Christmas, so they’re all in a bad mood.”

But Sharp, who left nursing in 1996, has fond memories of some holidays on the vascular and plastic surgery unit at UCLA Medical Center, where she worked in the 1980s. One year, the nurses decorated a tree with cotton balls, bandage strips, and blood tubes full of colored water. Another year they decorated the room of a 15-year-old patient who had lost her legs, and surprised the patient and her family with sacks of gifts on Christmas morning.

Their masterpiece was a birthday party for a teenage boy — the darling of their unit — who had broken his neck in a vehicle crash. The boy had miraculously come out of a coma and although he could not talk, he communicated with the nurses in a shaky scrawl. He told the nurses, jokingly, that for his 16th birthday he wanted a big cake with a girl jumping out of it.

The nurses decided they had to grant his wish in some way. An engineer friend helped Sharp design a cardboard cake and the nurses assembled it in a utility room. The patient’s favorite nurse — in work clothes — hid under it and the nurses pushed the cake and its contents to the patient’s room. After everyone sang “Happy Birthday,” the nurse in the cardboard cake burst out holding a real cake with candles.

The young patient clapped his hands and laughed so hard, tears ran down his face. Administrators and physicians congratulated the nurses. In her e-mail, Sharp wrote, “I’ll never forget how happy that day was for [the patient] and how we didn’t let our fears of looking unprofessional hamper our creative ability and our expression of love and caring for a young man whose future will undoubtedly be filled with challenges.”

“If you can liven up the place at all, it’s worthwhile,” Sharp says, recalling her unit’s energy and enthusiasm. “But it takes a lot of effort and you can’t do it alone. You have to have the spirit, and the spirit is infectious.”

Nurses say patients of all ages, creeds, and cultures appreciate any effort the staff makes to observe a holiday.

“Even just a candy cane, a card, or a mint from your nurse,” says Samuel Crow, RN, BSN, PHN, a med/surg staff nurse at St. Elizabeth Community Hospital in Red Bluff, Calif. “Or wearing a Santa hat.” Crow, who wears handmade scrubs decorated in various holiday motifs, says he is one of those people who always remembers birthdays and anniversaries. “I guess I’m corny and I have way too much free time on my hands.”

Last Christmas Eve, Crow asked a friend who was going to play Santa Claus at a family party to stop by the hospital after the party. When the friend, dressed in a full Santa suit, came into the hospital, all the workers — from physicians to maintenance staff — broke into delighted grins. Crow’s supervisor took Santa to the ICU, OB, and emergency departments where he passed out candy canes and greeted patients, including a 9-year-old girl who was having seizures.

The girl had been crying, Crow says, but when she saw Santa, she calmed down immediately and smiled.

On Crow’s unit, where Santa spent the most time, Crow entered patient rooms first, asking if they wanted to see a visitor from the North Pole. No one turned him down, Crow says. One patient, who had seemed especially depressed about being in the hospital on Christmas Eve, kept taking pictures of Santa with a new cell phone camera. He later sent a photo of Crow and Santa that the nurse framed and hung on his wall.

“It was worth it, just to see the reaction of those patients,” Crow says. “It made a difference.”

Nurses don’t have to spend much money or resources to create a festive atmosphere for themselves and their patients, says Paula Burleson, RN, clinical coordinator at DaVita Pearland (Texas) Dialysis.

Last Christmas Eve, nurses at her dialysis clinic threw a holiday party for patients and staff. An ambulance driver agreed to play Santa. The company provided treatment pillows as gifts for patients. Burleson went to a discount store and bought silver frames with velvet backing.

Staff members brought food and drinks and decorated a table. The unit secretary dressed as an elf and took pictures of patients receiving their gifts from Santa and presented the photos in the silver frames. Burleson’s daughter and the daughters of two other staff members played Christmas music on their flutes as background music for the party.

“It was low-cost, it wasn’t anything extravagant,” Burleson says.

When Evelyn Sheridan, RN, worked in home care as an LVN a few years ago, she cared for a young child who was on a ventilator. Sheridan worked holiday graveyard shifts, arriving at midnight. Every New Year’s Eve, she shared a bottle of sparkling apple juice with the child’s parents in his room and they watched the celebrations on the television.