For Christmas this year, I decided to go in search of my first “white” Christmas. Born and raised in Orlando, my life was more “sand” men instead of snowmen, and I’ve collectively seen snow maybe 5 times in my adult life.
One of my little dreams has always been to go experience a true “white” Christmas… falling snow, cold weather, the works. So this year, I went to Missouri to hang out with Chop’s friends & family. Of course, I was not all so happy that we arrive to low 60’s and plenty of sunshine on Friday.
But on Saturday night, the temperature plummeted quickly, and in a matter of minutes we had sideways falling snow and lots of ice. A group of us were piling into a car to head for an evening out, and the ice on the windshield was pretty thick. My stupid quote of the weekend had them laughing for about 15 minutes as they were scrambling to find an ice scraper: “This is gonna sound dumb, but what exactly does an ice scraper look like?” I get the concept, but growing up in Orlando, its not like we had them lining the shelves at the hardware store. We never ended up finding the scraper, so a gift card substituted enough to get us a little visibility out the windshield. In the about 2 hour time frame, I got to experience about a foot of the snowy white stuff, even if it wasn’t going to accumulate any for snow angels or snowmen.
There was some ice accumulation, and the next night, I got an up close introduction to it, followed by another teary-eyed spell of laughter. Standing on the hillside driveway, Stacie and I were climbing in her truck to go to the convenience store. She just started to say “Careful, its slipper…” when I did one of those comic book, slow-mo banana peel face plants on a blade of ice. “whoa. Whooa. WHOOAAAA. Smack.” I about died laughing at myself.
Comic moment #3 came coming back from the store. Stacie tried to pull back up the driveway, but when we hit that same patch of ice, we started sliding back down. After a few attempts, Stacie stops and looks at me. “What do we do?” Right. Ask the Florida native what to do on ice. We sat there and pondered if we put the truck in park and hit the e-brake would it still slide down the hill. Not knowing the truck was 4-wheel drive, we decided that it would be best to back in down the driveway and park out front. Only problem: the ice sliding we’d done had moved us a little off-course from the narrow drive, and our attempt at backing back down the driveway resulted in getting the truck completely STUCK in loose gravel and snow. Stacie’s fiance, Ronnie came out to rescue us, and made me feel like a complete moron when he put it in 4-low and proceeded out of the gravel and up the icy drive.
The rest of the week was warm and sunny, and I still didn’t get my white Christmas. My real snowman will have to wait until another year.
Happy Holidays!