christmas memories

This year, our Christmas was one to remember. Unfortunately, I don't mean that in a good way. Our Christmas Eve was the worst ever. Seriously.

Our plans for the day consisted of hanging out, waiting for the snow and doing some cooking. My parents were supposed to be over at 4:30 pm to exchange gifts, eat dinner and then go to church. The "fun" all started about 9 am on Christmas Eve when our electricity went out. After several frustrating attempts to call the electric company to report the outage and get some information regarding when we could expect our lights to come back on, I learned that we could expect our power to be restored around 11:30 am. So, we tried to make the best of the situation. The snow started around lunchtime and was so pretty (and exciting)! I read somewhere that the last time we had a white Christmas in Dallas was in 1926!

The snow continued to fall and fall and the winds picked up so that we really and truly had near-blizzard conditions. When our power still wasn't back on by 2:30 pm. Jeff ventured out into the blizzard to talk to the Oncor repairman working up the street. He came back to report that there were 2 bad power lines and a blown transformer in our neighborhood and that Oncor hoped to have power restored by 5 or 6 that evening. Panic started to set in for me at this point. I had no way to cook our Christmas dinner, and I even started to fear that the power wouldn't come back on at all that night. What about Santa??? Where would we sleep?

We decided to ditch the plans for church and take the food to my parents' house (half an hour away) to cook, eat and open presents. So, we loaded the car and braved the blizzard. The drive over was a pretty one with all the snow and the lights.

At my parents' house we were warm, we cooked and enjoyed opening presents and spending time together. All was good. When we were ready to head for home, it was dark, it had stopped snowing and the roads were frozen. We made it to the first overpass on the highway before we hit a patch of ice and slid into another car which then slid into another car. Sigh.

Thankfully, there were no injuries, just some busted up bumpers, broken lights and bent up panels. After the accident, one of the other drivers insisted on calling the police rather than just exchanging insurance information. So we had to wait for the officer and then wait for everything to play out. We finally got home about 2 hours after we had left my parents' house and tucked the kids into bed just after 10 pm. Santas elves got busy right away getting things ready for Christmas morning. Jeff and I finally got to bed around 1 am.

Christmas day was much better! The kids loved all of their gifts and Jeff and I were able to put the previous day's woes behind us and enjoy the day. But we sure hope to never have another Christmas Eve like that one!