Christmas Eve

When we woke on the morning of Christmas Eve, a blizzard had just ended. This meant I spent a bit of time rousing everyone from their warm and cozy beds to shovel sidewalks and the driveway. I was not popular. (Dr. Peds was working at the hospital). On my way out the door to help with the snow, I happened to notice a plastic sack in my cubby under my coat. Sure enough, it was the fresh turkey for Christmas dinner that I had purchased 26 hours earlier. I texted Dr. Peds about what to do. I could have sworn I had put it in the refrigerator. In fact, I could envision putting it in the refrigerator so perfectly that I would have bet a large sum of money on the fact that I could have walked to the refrigerator, opened the door and pointed directly to the turkey. But somehow in actuality I had not, in fact, placed the turkey in the refrigerator at all. Although our house is veritably chilly all the time this time of year, it isn’t quite as chilly as a refrigerator. While we did think for a time we might still be able to cook that turkey on Christmas Day, when we actually opened it up it smelled pretty funky and I ended up throwing it away with a sad face.

Then, when The Devious Snail tried to start the snowblower, the pull rope broke. Luckily we had very generous neighbors with snowblowers who helped with our longest sidewalk, our driveway, and another little section of sidewalk, which greatly cut down on shoveling time. Still, I had to text Dr. Peds at work a second time to let him know about the defunct state of the snowblower.

When I came inside I found a package that had been delivered which was supposed to contain a Christmas present, but the worker at Amazon hadn’t sealed the envelope right, and the package completely empty. So I texted Dr. Peds again so that I would file the return claim correctly (I knew he would know what to do).

That meant I had texted Dr. Peds at work more times that ever within a ninety minute period. Good grief. He was rolling his eyes.

The day just proceeded on from there, full of mini disasters and unusual surprises, squabbling and arguing, but yet Christmas goodness at the same time: drama here and there but also patience and graciousness in between, which are so often the antidote to mini disasters.

At the end of the day the two youngest kidlets happily camped out under the tree, shunned by the older siblings who declared themselves “too old” for the tradition (WHAT?!?). I wrapped the presents and crawled off sleepily to bed.

Strangely, because they’ve been on a sleeping-in schedule for nine months straight now, no one was up at the crack of dawn begging to open presents before the sun rose. In fact, I was one of the first people up for breakfast.

Weird times.