The Christmas season is supposed to be a time of family gatherings, giving to loved ones (sometimes out of obligation), tacky sweaters, spending money you don't have, traveling, fighting over parking spots and just maybe dusting off your faith. We all know what the meaning of Christmas is intended to be. Much of the Christian faith recognizes and celebrates the birth of Jesus. As for the rest, it can often simply be a hassle. This year, my family had what we call:
A Griswold Christmas.
We took that name from the lovable family featured in the movie Christmas Vacation. If you have not seen the movie, basically everything that can go wrong does. Christmas lights don't work, Clark (Chevy Chase) does not get an expected bonus, both sets of grandparents arrive and create all kinds of havoc (along with Cousin Eddie and his clan) and the cat gets electrocuted. Of course there is more, yet you can probably get the idea.
This year from Christmas Eve on we had our very own Griswold Christmas. The fun started when our lovely 7 year old daughter woke us up at 4 AM throwing up in our room on our carpet. That is after she had already done this in her room on her carpet. I mean, why go to the bathroom when you can spread the love to more carpeted floor?
The next issue was a small one. We had a nail in one of our tires. Do you know how hard it is to find a tire store open on Christmas Eve in small town North Carolina? I did find one, and could proceed to the local YMCA for a workout. What else could go wrong?
The matriarch of our family is the lovely and talented Amy. Along with keeping the kids (and me) in line, she is a licensed professional counselor. Occasionally she has to be on call. This means that when there is an emergency mental health emergency she must go out and do an assessment on the person, decide what the course of action is, and try to get them some help. As I was heading home from my workout, I was receiving a frantic call from Amy that she had to head out to the hospital to do an assessment. She was confident it would not take long. Five hours later she finally got to come home. For a while. More on that later.
This past summer we got a dog. Major has provided a good bit of fun and frivolity to our family. He has also spent more time indoors than any of us really initially imagined or intended. Because he is still pretty young, he often has a lot of energy. Christmas Eve was pretty cold, so he was indoors a good bit of the day. We like to throw a tennis ball and he likes to bring it to us, play a little tug-of-war, then chase it again. Occasionally things get out of hand. One such occasion involved our trusty lap top and a TV stand that is often our computer table. Major ran into the "table" and knocked down the computer. The cover of the lap top disconnected from the main body of the computer. You think that is all? Wait, there's more!
A little while later things seemed to be calming down. The computer had been nursed to health, everyone was calm and at home and we were settling in for the evening. It was time to cook dinner. The aforementioned Amy was just getting things together to prepare dinner. Without any warning, and for no apparent reason, the power went out. The Waffle House is always open, so we decided to make the best of a less than super ideal situation and eat there. The food was fine and the company was, as always, interesting.
We got home from dinner and I decided to make a fire. No electricity, so why not? We got blankets, lit candles and settled in for an unusual night. The fire was soon roaring. We had plenty of light to play some board games and read the Christmas story-a family tradition on Christmas Eve. I noticed smoke was filling the house. I checked. I had opened the damper. I closed and opened it again to no avail. Smoke was pouring into our den. We opened a window and another door-which got some smoke out, but certainly did not help our heating situation.
Finally everything calmed down. Andrew and I were settled on the floor by the fire. Amy and Lauren were on the couch. Everyone was bundled up and warm. We were headed to sleep....and the power came back on! Perfect timing, although we were not complaining.
The rest of the evening was fine. The kids went to bed, we went to bed after setting out a few items for Christmas morning and everything was great. Until 1:30 AM. At that time, Amy received another call from the hospital and had to head back out. She returned right around 5:30 AM. Now that is a great way to spend the early part of Christmas morning!
Christmas Day started out normally. The kids got up and we opened our gifts, we had a good breakfast and everyone was settled in for Christmas Day. Around 9 AM, it began to snow. It snowed, and snowed and snowed. We ended up with about 8 inches that day. Everything looked great and for the first time in my life, I got to play in the snow on Christmas Day.
The only negative about the snow is that it played havoc with our travel plans. The day after Christmas Day we had planned to head up to Virginia and spend some time at a camp hanging out as a family. They had more snow than we did, so we decided to stay home. No big deal, we just spent more time playing in the snow.
By Monday we needed to get out. The roads were mostly clear (as far as we knew) and the kids had money burning a hole in their pocket. So we loaded up and headed off to Asheville. We did some shopping and went to a movie. Upon leaving the movie I noticed that some cars were having a bit of a tough time with some ice on the road we needed to drive. I backed way off the car in front of me to have plenty of room in the event we started sliding. Well the car in front of us (probably 50 feet in front) started sliding and went into the curb. I tried to back off even more, but there was too much ice on the road. We slid into that car at about 4 miles per hour. There was plenty of time to tell everybody to brace themselves and prepare to meet the nice lady in front of us. I probably had time to eat a sandwich we were moving so slowly. After we bumped her, the nice lady in back of us hit us. Man those were nice folks. I sure wish we had not met in that manner!
Well there was very little damage to any one's vehicle, which is good. I still had to pay my insurance deductible, which was bad. Nobody was injured, nobody was mad and everyone could drive away in their own vehicle. All in all, things could be worse.
We figured everything was done. I think it was my son who asked, "What else can go wrong?" Please take my advice-don't ever ask that question.
To be honest, nothing else big occurred. Our lap top seemed to be possessed by a demon. I suppose that will happen when it is 6 or so years old and just got dropped on the floor. At times, it would just shut off. You might be surfing that whole world wide web thing, and then all of a sudden, the computer would just turn off. On New Year's Eve, my lovely bride was conducting some important online business (FACEBOOK) and it happened to her. Now things were not funny any more. So off we went to get a new computer.
Earlier in the week we had checked out a few models. I had done some research and we made plans to get one in the not too distant future. Now things were critical and we had to have one today! We went to a store, got the one we wanted and took it home. In doing so, we stayed far away from that road where we had the accident only a few days before. I know some of you were concerned about that.
After we got home, I began the process of setting this baby up. This was fun! A computer that worked. A screen that is 17" and HD. A blue ray player. After doing a few things, I had to shut it down and restart it. At that point, the problems started. Upon restarting, a message popped up that our battery was not going to work. Our brand new battery on our brand new computer was not accepting a charge. A call to the store to an incredulous store employee (who was probably just waiting to get off work and party I am sure) and we learned we needed to take the computer in to them. That would have to wait until the next day. So I kept installing things of course. We had purchased Microsoft Office. I know you Mac snobs out there are snickering, and that is fine. The code I was provided at the store would not work. So I got to spend a couple of hours on the phone with a nice lad in India who helped me. This computer was great. Until the next day.
My lovely bride took our new home computing device back to the store to check out this whole battery issue. An employee turned it on, and hey lookie there, the battery won't charge?! They got us another computer of the same model, changed the hard drive I had so diligently worked on to the new case, and off she went. After we got the new little one home, I had to install a few things over again. Everything worked great except Office. So back I went to the phone. I called one number, no solution. I called another number, which asked for our code. Then I was told that number was not valid because it had already been used. Of course it had. So I had to call another number. For the first time all day, I spoke to an American. He seemed to care about me. We talked about how frustrated I was to be dealing with this while I should have been closely watching the Rose Bowl. He cared so much, that he transferred me to Jabeeb. I promise you that is his name. For the next 2 and a half hours I talked with Jabeeb. At one point, he got one of his friends on the phone for a conference call. And he did not care that TCU had just scored a touchdown!
Finally-everything worked. And finally, "bad" things stopped happening. I doubt seriously there was some correlation between the computer finally being set up well and the lack of less than super ideal things happening to us. It was a happy coincidence though.
So that is our story. The year we had the Griswold Christmas. Nothing too bad happened, yet it got to be a bit comical. Even though we had a string of stuff occur, we were all in relatively good health, we were together and we managed to have some fun and spend some quality time with each other.
With the new year, we hope we get the "bad" things out during the year instead of having them all in the course of a week or so. Can you plan those things? I would sure like to try!
