Waffle House is ‘glowing beacon’ of comfort - so family took Christmas card photos there
When Malinda Nichols started thinking about this year’s Christmas card, she only knew one thing: it would have to show her family as it actually was.
“Last week I told my husband that I didn’t want to do another round of family Christmas card photos outside with the trees and nature around us. It’s not us. It’s not who we are. It’s not what we do. So we were like ‘well then where should we take our photos that WILL reflect who we are?’ And clearly, we arrived at the only logical answer,” Nichols wrote on Facebook.
What was that answer? They were a waffle family. And a waffle Christmas card they would have.
When Nichols first broached the idea of a Waffle House photo shoot with the manager of the 24-hour southern staple in Helena, Ala., the manager looked at her like she had “lost every part of my mind,” Nichols said in a phone interview with McClatchy.
But the manager gave the go-ahead, and Nichols, a school teacher, recruited one of her former students, photographer Jake Marvin, to take the pictures. She grabbed her husband Zack and their two 5-year-old daughters, Evie and Dhanya Sri, and they sat down for the breakfast bash.
Their waitress made sure everything was perfect, Nichols said, wiping away anything that would mess up the photos and sweeping napkins off the floor. It was empty, a slow Sunday afternoon, and so they were the only ones in the restaurant. Almost.
“One elderly couple walked in and they just stood there and looked at us — and then sat down and ordered their food,” Nichols said, laughing.
So why Waffle House? Or, as Nichols calls it, “Waffle Home?”
“Everyone loves this place. It’s this glowing beacon, it’s always there, there’s always one nearby. I can’t think of one reason why anyone would not go to a Waffle House,” Nichols said.
Plus, the warm, comforting embrace of Waffle House held a lot of personal importance to her family’s life.
“It was one of Dhanya’s first tastes of America, and was my last meal before we went to the hospital to have Evie,” Nichols wrote on Facebook. “We’ve eaten here on date nights when we just wanted to wear sweatpants and watch a movie, have had great and meaningful conversations with our best friends, drove straight here from the airport after a long trips abroad, hit it up after football games, sought it out on road trips ... or like most people, just end up here when we want comfort food!”
People on social media loved the photos and said they were an adorable way to mark the holiday time for the family.