When you\’re in a long-term committed relationship there are certain compromises that you are forced to make. I, for example, am bound to buying only sweet onions until the end of time and have watched my fair share of Halo and Fall Out 3. However, Christmas is a whole different ball game. For one thing, everyone has their holiday traditions and when you try and combine two people from two different families there are bound to be fights about fake vs. real trees, opening presents on Christmas Eve or morning and whose family will be visited.
Now, Evan and I have been together for three Christmases and had never celebrated together. This year seemed like the perfect time because within the last year all of my siblings have either gotten married or engaged and were already paired off. It seemed only natural to have Evan there. But with Christmas, compromise is inevitable and for every moment he spends with my family, I am at least somewhat obligated to spend time with his family as well. So, we decided to split the Christmas holiday. We would do Christmas Eve at his parent\’s house in Round Rock and we would do Christmas morning with my family in Houston. This seemed to be the perfect plan. My family does basically nothing on Christmas Eve, save going to church, and Evan\’s family has a nice appetizer based dinner while opening presents on Christmas Eve night.
The only teeny issue, is the distance between Round Rock and Spring is about 2.5 hours. So after spending all of Christmas Eve with Evan\’s family we planned on sleeping and getting up extremely early (like 5am) on Christmas morning in order to be in Spring early enough to open presents and satisfy my brothers insatiable desire to begin Christmas at the crack of dawn. That was the plan and it seemed to work out perfectly. But then no good story works out perfectly…
Christmas Eve goes off without a hitch, after watching hours of Jerry Springer with his dad (it\’s best not to ask) we went to Evan\’s parents\’ church for Christmas Eve service, came home, opened presents, watched the Pope\’s midnight mass and went to bed. Come 5 a.m. Evan and I get up and call my mom to let her know we are on our way, just one thing. There\’s this chicken place in Canada called St. Hubert\’s and they make this gravy that it is super delicious. Like so delicious my family buys cases of it when we go to Canada and brings it down just so we will have a steady supply throughout the year. However, due to other totally unrelated events, we only had St. Hubert\’s gravy at the house in Pflugerville, so because I was on my way down anyways, I was told to just stop by really quick and pick up the gravy on the way down. So that\’s what we did…or tried to anyways. Little did we know that once Evan turned off my car, that would be the last time the ignition would turn. We got the gravy, but when we got back to the car the ignition absolutely would not turn. It got locked up. When we moved the steering wheel to try to unlock the ignition, it locked up too. When we attempted to shift gears, it got locked up too. Everything quickly became immobile and at 5am Christmas morning there was nothing open, no one to help us and nothing we could do. Thankfully, Evan\’s mom showed pity on us and let us borrow her car to drive down to Houston provided we brought it back up the next day. Christmas miracle. We did eventually make it to Spring around 11am and had a good Christmas with my family and even made it to Conroe to see Evan\’s extended family. So, despite a stressful morning, the rest of the day went pretty well.
While we originally wanted to stay in Spring for a couple of days, we had to at least drive the car back to Evan\’s mom. So my dad came up to look at my car. Long story short, two tow trucks had to come (apparently if you can\’t put your car in neutral it makes it very difficult to tow). and take my car to the dealership. Final Verdict? A broken ignition column….and it cost almost $500 to replace. Fun times.
That was my adventure on Christmas. What about yours?