This happened on Christmas Eve 2020, but last year I also found myself locked out of my apartment after dark on Christmas Eve, as part of another long story. It’ll be interesting to see what happens this year. . .
1. Be stressed out about the choir’s performance at church to the exclusion of all other considerations.
2. Carpool to church with your sister, who is fortunately on top of things and makes sure the necessary doors are locked and so on.
3. Nearly destroy the choir by bursting into laughter in the middle of a piece, thanks to one of those thoughts that’s always way more funny when you’re in the wrong place to laugh, but narrowly avoid it.
4. Halfway through the bit where you’re just standing in front of everybody doing nothing, have the sudden idea to invite Jacob to dinner at your family’s house that night.
5. At the end of the service act on this idea by asking both parents if that would be too much spontaneity.
a. You have talked yourself into getting that far by asking what you have to lose by asking. You will find out.
b. Your parents consider the idea and agree that it wouldn’t be too much spontaneity.
6. Formally invite the guest in question.
7. Forget to inform your parents that he said yes.
8. Forget to get your sister’s opinion of this idea or to tell her that he accepted the invitation, or both.
9. Arrange that he should follow you and your sister (still carpooling) to the family home, as your parents have disappeared.
10. Arrange with your sister (actually she does most of the arranging) that she should run back to your place to get her things, and the phone she forgot to bring with her. You will wait at the church, she’ll pick you up, you’ll go to supper. Easy, right.
11. Wait twenty minutes for her to come back, in increasing dismay.
12. She will return in great perturbation, coming into the foyer to catch the tail end of a conversation on how it’s okay when things aren’t perfect.
13. You’ll leave. Once you’re in the car, she will combust. She only wanted a quiet night at home! You didn’t tell her this random guy was showing up! She just wanted to eat pork pie and go to bed early! And she didn’t forget her phone — she dropped it in the snow underneath your car and it was there the entire time you were at church! Where’s a bag of rice when you need it! People tease her about always having one but she doesn’t and now she needs it and you brought some guy to supper without consulting her!
14. Turn onto 212 and get stuck behind someone who goes 40 to 45 mph all the way to the stoplight at 7 in Monte. “Goodwill to men” does not extend to slow drivers.
a. Appease the wrathful goddess with offerings of sea salt chocolate bark.
15. Arrive at the house at last, remembering too late that the Wise Student would have warned Jacob before now that the “Monte house” is ten miles outside of town on two gravel roads.
16. Semi-pleasant theological and bookish shenanigans will ensue. Enjoy them while they last.
17. Go to leave, discovering that as you carpooled with your sister, you have no car to go home in, though you do have your own car’s key.
18. Borrow your mother’s van.
19. Get all the way home (noting things like “good, the Streblows finally went to bed on time”), only to discover that, as happened once before, your sister essentially locked your door and drove away, leaving you on the outside and your own house key and phone inside. This time, fortunately, you have a car key. (Michael Barrone keeps reminding you that it’s one degree with windchills of up to ten below; and you are in the wrong shoes for walking in all the snow.)
20. Proceed to the parsonage, hoping there’s still a light on. Great, the Streblows finally went to bed on time. Observe the lighted living room window.
21. Ring the doorbell, a small girl with nowhere to lay her head on Christmas Eve.
22. When Pastor answers, break down laughing, in keeping with tradition. Borrow his phone to call your dad (who answers, a bit worried to be getting a call from Pastor at nine-thirty on Christmas Eve night).
23. Arrange to meet your sister at the halfway point, to take her key.
24. While driving, hear a small “tack!” noise. Your ivory ring will have cracked.
25. Wait for your sister while listening to Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day courtesy of Stephen Cleobury and the BBC Choir.
26. Take the ring from an inexplicably cranky sister and turn around.
27. Arriving at home the second time, narrowly miss running into your own van, having forgotten that you can’t just park in your usual spot, being, as it were, already parked there.
28. Go inside and crash into bed.
The true Spirit of Christmas, after all, is things not going the way people planned them to. Also being locked out in the middle of the night, really. I’m sure Mary had not planned on giving birth in a cave, possibly without even a midwife, in an unfamiliar town that had just finished making clear exactly how much she wasn’t wanted there. We got off fairly easy in comparison.
Of Dreams and Swords 