Holiday Traditions

December 26th, 2008

Paige and I watch a movie on Christmas Day every year. It’s our thing. This year it was an especially difficult tradition to uphold since our car has been stuck in our driveway for the past week thanks to Snowmaggedon. We are one of those families that don’t own a snow shovel (come to think of it, we don’t even own a regular shovel) and the snow in our driveway is twice as deep as everywhere else since the heavy winds early this week deposited it there as a special gift.

Yesterday it started to warm up just a tad and snow showers were mixed up with our beloved rain showers. This resulted in our street looking like someone threw up a giant dirt Slurpy in our neighborhood. Slush is just sitting in the street because the drains are clogged with snow and minature iceburgs are just floating on top ready to sink your car like the Titanic.

Not to let Snowmaggedon ruin our holiday tradition, we decided to take the 1:15 pm bus into downtown to watch the 2:30 pm showing of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I was hoping to meet Rene and Justin downtown to so I sent her a text saying that she should meet us. She called me back to tell me that I was smoking crack and that the movie started at 3:30, not 2:30. My self-righteous ass told her, “NUH-UH the internet told me it was playing at 2:30.”

But Rene was right and the Internet (NWSource) was wrong. INTERNET FAIL! This of course threw a huge wrench into our plans to ride the bus and make it home in time to eat dinner. Given that BenButton is a 3 hour movie, we decided to change course and watch Marley and Me instead. We walked to the bus stop thinking that we could still take the 1:15 and make it in time for the 2:00 showing (clearly I must have still been smoking crack). After booking it to the bus stop, I came to the sad realization that the bus schedule online is not same as the written bus schedule at the stop. Guess which one was right? That’s right, INTERNET DOUBLE FAIL!

We just missed the bus.

While tempted to wait the 25 minutes (in the sleet) for the next bus to arrive, we decided to regroup back at home instead. Determined not to miss out on our holiday tradition, I decided to go to plan “b” … try and get my car out of the driveway. Knowing that the snow was probably too deep, I started using the most “shovel-like” thing I could find – a plastic sled. After about 10 ineffective minutes of moving a half inch of snow around, I started cracking up and almost peed my pants from laughing so hard about how ridiculous I must have looked trying to clear the iceberg out of the driveway with a snow toy.

This is where Paige interjects that she believes that I am, “Losing it.” Little does she know that I never had “it” in the first place.

Still not dissuaded, I do the last thing I can think of – pull a Dukes of Hazzard out of my driveway. I put the Volvo in reverse, slammed on the gas pedal and literally went flying and out of the driveway backwards. It worked!

Paige and I headed downtown racing against the clock to make it to Marley and Me on time.

We made it with 5 minutes to spare.

But it was sold out.

And so was Benjamin Button.

Tags: christmas, holiday tradition, paige

This entry was posted on Friday, December 26th, 2008 at 5:41 pm and is filed under Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.