The first day the 24th appeared at the end of the list, I got so excited: "Flurries Possible!" A little bit of snow for Christmas? Could it possibly be true? In Tulsa it rarely snows at all before January, and usually the end of January (although we did have a freak snowstorm last March).
Remember what I said about the forecasts changing before the day gets here? Well, we had WAY more than "flurries". On Christmas Eve it rained a slow rain for most of the morning, then it sleeted for a couple of hours, then it snowed, and snowed, and showed! It was windy, too... I think I saw on the news one time that we had 35mph sustained winds and 50mph gusts (which is what made it possibly a "blizzard" and not just a "snowstorm"). Apparently it was only the third time in history that the National Weather Service has issued a blizzard warning for us.
Needless to say, it was a great night to stay home and open some presents! Christmas Eve services were canceled at our church (and even at the church we just switched from... most churches in town canceled because of driving visibility problems) so we hung out at home, opened presents to each other, and got all ready for Santa. In this picture you can see a remarkable number of our presents... when I snapped it I didn't realize that virtually everything we gave to each other was in the frame! :) Everybody got good stuff; nobody came away disappointed. The kids went to bed and got safely to sleep before Santa showed... but boy, did he show up in a big way!
Mikey woke us up early and discovered that Santa had left a Nintendo Wii for him! We had a blast later exchanging friend codes with Mikey's cousins Elizabeth and Eden and racing Mario Karts with them over the Internet, us in Tulsa and them just outside of Fort Worth. Hannah slept in a little later, but when she got up she found that she had gotten a 2-year-old-sized kitchen playset, complete with oven, microwave, fridge, and even a cell phone and a (sticker of a) CD player! She also got a little Disney Princess folding table and chairs, just the right size for her and a teddy-bear friend. I spent some quality time in the driveway with my snow shovel; you can see some of the pictures at the top of this post (and some more via the link at the end of the post). There was about an inch layer of sleet on the bottom, and then probably 6-7 inches of snow on top of that (more in places where it had blown into drifts). I've had enough experience to know that if I let it go for a day or two without clearing it, it would likely melt and re-freeze, and that makes it twice as hard to clear, so I wanted to do as much to get it out of there as possible the first day!
We had planned to have lunch out with my mom and dad on Christmas, and then go to visit Cathy's brother's house later on for dinner, opening presents in both places. Well, the weather was OK for driving (carefully), but for some reason it hadn't occurred to us that nothing would be open on Christmas day! Mom and Cathy both called around, looking for restaurants. I was using Google Maps to just try to remember what restaurants were close by so we could call them, and Cathy told me "Type in 'restaurants in Tulsa that are open on Christmas.'" I was like, you have GOT to be kidding me... but I did it anyway. The first hit on Google was a 5-year-old Tulsa World article talking about Tally's Cafe being open on Christmas. I've driven past Tally's (at 11th & Yale) any number of times, but never had any reason to eat there. Cathy called, they were open, so now I had a reason! Mom and Dad said they would meet us there.
The roads were still a little icy; not difficult to maneuver as long as you kept it down to, say, 30mph or so, but I figured the highway would be a little clearer, so I hit the on-ramp. The highway was at LEAST as icy as the city streets! I doubt I saved myself any time at all! But we did get there safely... and I tried to park, and got stuck! A couple of guys came out right away to help me get out, and I think one of them was Tally himself! :)
Tally's is kind of a 50's diner kind of place. The ambiance is wonderful, the food is plentiful and quite tasty, and the waitstaff is attentive and friendly. We all saved enough of our meal to eat half for lunch the next day! (At Tally's they have a huge stack of to-go boxes right next to the cash register, if that's any indication.) I think we'll be going back... even on days when it's not the only restaurant open in town!
We decided to go over to Mom and Dad's and open presents, despite the fact that it had gotten dark and I really didn't want to ice-drive in the dark. Mikey went with Mom and Dad, and Cathy and Hannah and I loaded up in our car. I had parked in a church parking lot behind Tally's which appeared to have been sanded or cleared somehow, because there were some clear parking spaces where I knew I would be able to get traction enough to pick up speed and get out of the slushy parking area... but someone had already gotten stuck in the exit I had planned to use, so I couldn't get out! I looked around for another way out, and spotted my exit behind the car. It wasn't going to be easy, but it was going to have to do.
I got the car turned around without taking the wheels off the de-iced cement and looked over where I needed to go. As straight a spot as I could find was what I was looking for, so my front-wheel-drive Pontiac Vibe could use its own momentum to carry it over any slushy spots. I put my foot on the accelerator, pointed the wheels at the exit, and hoped for the best!
The ride was REALLY bumpy. There were ruts in the ice from previous vehicles, and the place that I thought was an exit turned out to have a curb hidden under the snow... WHAM! But we got out without getting stuck. And Hannah was LAUGHING the whole time! She LOVED it! As I was driving down 11th Street toward my parents' house, she was still saying "Do again! Do again!!" (in about eight or nine years or so, she's going to be Mama's buddy on all of those Tulsa State Fair rides I won't go on!)
We opened presents at Mom & Dad's and they opened ours, and I managed to get us all home without sliding into anything. Unfortunately, I had to call my grandpa in Shreveport, Louisiana and tell him that we didn't feel confident that the roads were sufficiently safe to make the trip down to see him the next day. He told me that he was glad to not have to hear the news that I slid off the road backwards on the ice in my car trying to get down to his house. :) They only got flurries down there, and I don't even know that it stuck at all. Hopefully we can make it down there as soon as the snow melts.
So Saturday we got up with very little planned. Mikey and Hannah were having fun with their new stuff; Hannah cleaned up her toy kitchen while Mama cleaned up the real kitchen to get some yummy pancakes made for breakfast. In some parts of the world, the 26th of December is a holiday called Boxing Day (traditionally a day for giving to the poor), but Cathy and Mikey made sure it was Boxing Day by beating the snot out of Mii boxers in Wii Sports. :) Later Hannah and Mikey and I went out in the back yard and let Hannah have her first chance to play with real snow, and I pounded Mikey with snowballs! (Actually, he got in a good lick or two, too!) Then Hannah went in for her nap and Mikey and I went down the street to a place where Mikey could do some hill-sledding with a plastic sled we picked up a few years ago. We had a great time sledding! And for a dad, I think we had just as great of a time walking a few blocks down to the hill, just me and Mikey. Those times are opportunities that come too few and far between in these busy times. You can't buy that kind of time with your kids. If you have children, seek out times to be alone with them every once in a while. I figure that if I don't, once they're grown and gone, I'll wish I had. Something comes to me quite frequently as my kids are growing up: THIS time for them is exactly like the 70s or 80s were for me. One day they will be the age I am now, and today will be a time from their childhood, just like days from 1979 or 1972 are to me. What I do today is part of the childhood memories of someone in the future. I want to make the stories they remember and tell their own children happy ones!
After that things became more mundane... I worked a little more on the driveway (which I had failed to make it all the way up the night before), then I went to Wal-Mart for a few supplies and to check out road conditions (not perfect, but better... we're going to attempt the trip to church in the morning), then I came home and we made our annual day-after-Christmas birthday cake for Jesus. The day after Christmas can seem like a big bummer sometimes, so a few years ago we decided to treat what normally is a quiet, uneventful day as our Santa-free, gift-opening-free day to think about Jesus and bake a homemade cake. Kind of gives you something fun to look forward to, instead of full-speed-ahead Christmas and then it's over so suddenly that the airbags deploy! We played some more Wii and did our thing (Mikey and I are becoming fairly accomplished Wii Tennis players, but I'm still pretty dismal at Mario Kart Wii... Mikey took to it like a duck to water the first time he played it, though, and he almost always wins first place in the races!) Now the kids are in bed, and it took so long to write this post that Cathy's in bed, too! If you want to see pictures of the snow, Mikey sledding, etc. check them all out here. If you want to swap friend codes and race Karts sometime, shoot me an email and we'll set something up! I'll warn you, though... Mikey will kick your hiney. Just sayin'.
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