Its a Christmas Miracle!!!

There are very few movies that I will watch more than once. Especially on an annual basis. This was not always the case. As a teenager, several friends and I would get together on Saturday night to watch movies. This was always followed by Saturday Night Live, which was in its prime at that time, in my humble opinion. We would occasionally find our way down to the local Blockbuster Video and pick up a new release, but more often than not we would come back to one of our standby favorites. At the top of that list were Better Off Dead, The Princess Bride and Monty Python and the Hold Grail. I’ve seen each of these movies dozens of times. To this day, I can still quote each of them by heart, nearly word-for-word. They are cult classics for me in every sense of the term.

There is also one seasonal movie that I can watch each year during this season and never tire of seeing it. That movie involves a certain pink bunny suit, a carbine action, 200-shot range model air rifle, and of course the soft glow of electric sex sitting in the window. That’s right, I look forward greatly to my annual viewing of The Christmas Story.

As the story goes, Ralphie wants nothing more than to receive a new Red Rider BB gun for Christmas. He asks his parents for one; he writes a school essay about one; he asks the mall Santa for one. Each time his answer is the same - “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid”.

Imagine his surprise on Christmas morning when, after seemingly opening all of the presents under the tree, his parents brandish one remaining present which was hidden out of sight. Could it be? Could this be the answer to a young boy’s often uttered pleadings and prayers? He tears into the wrapping paper and finds that it is indeed his very own Red Rider, complete with “a compass in the stock, and this thing that tells time”. It was truly a Christmas Miracle.

Several years ago, while Jaylynn and I were living in Nebraska during graduate school, her parents were facing their first year of not having all of their children home for the holidays. This was very hard on them, especially on my mother-in-law, Irene.

Omaha is about a 10 hour drive from their hometown of Gillette, Wyoming. It is a difficult drive under the best of circumstances, not taking into account the possibility of in-climate weather while driving on I-90 across the Badlands of South Dakota in December. Add to that the fact that both of us were working to help pay for schooling expenses. There was no feasible way that we would be able to make it over to see them this year. Or at least that is what we told them.

However, in reality, Jaylynn wanted to see her family for the holidays just as badly as they wanted to see her, err, I mean us. It would have taken blizzard conditions to keep us away from Gillette that cold Christmas season. The difficulty arose when we found out one of us, I can’t remember who, was working until late afternoon on Christmas eve.

On finding that the weather just might cooperate with our covert operation, we packed up the car and readied ourselves to hit the highway at the earliest opportunity. That opportunity came at quitting time, 5:00 pm, on Christmas eve. So onto the highway we went, driving hundreds of miles through the night, across three states to our destination in Gillette, Wyoming. We alerted one person of our travel plans, Jaylynn’s sister Emily, who agreed to leave her front door unlocked for us to enter when we arrived.

At about 6:00 in the morning, we pulled into the neighborhood and parked our easily-recognizable car a half block away from her house and stealthily crept in through the front door, hoping to not awake any of the other people in the house. We hid ourselves in the spare room in the basement, hoping to catch a few minutes of sleep before the designated time when the entire family would arrive for the Christmas morning festivities.

Seemingly within minutes, people started to arrive at Emily’s home. We remained hidden until the last of the family members arrived. As they remained scattered throughout the kitchen and dining area preparing breakfast, we emerged from our hiding place, shouting, “Surprise! Merry Christmas!”

Irene stood there, motionless for several moments, speechless and unable to register what she was witnessing. Tears immediately welled up in her eyes as she then let out a joyful scream and yelled at the top of her lungs, “Its a Christmas miracle!!!”  

This phrase has stuck with our family over the subsequent 12 or so years. Whenever anything pleasantly unexpected occurs, regardless of the time of year, Its a Christmas miracle! When our sub-saharan climate hometown received 12 inches of snow on December 27th, 2003 (close enough for us), Its a Christmas miracle! When I showed up yesterday with donuts for breakfast, Its a Christmas miracle!

So Merry Christmas to all and here’s to many more Christmas miracles for years to come.