For Elbida Gomez, the winter holiday season is not marked by cheer or family time, but by an exponential increase in her workload — cleaning bathrooms and store offices, taking out the trash, mopping entrances, and wiping up food from the floor of the employee cafeteria.

The forty-three-year-old mother of two says she is one of just two people whose primary job is to clean the Woodbury, Minnesota, location of Cabela’s, a big box store chain that sells hunting, fishing, and camping goods. Foot traffic increases as patrons do their holiday shopping. Parents line up with their children to take a photograph with Santa Claus. The floor gets covered in chocolate, candy wrappers, and footprints, and, once the snow comes, the store entrance is perpetually coated in salt and sand, she says.

“There is little time and a lot of work,” says Gomez, who has done janitorial work since she moved to the United States from Honduras around fifteen years ago.