Yesterday I wrote that in 43 years, I’d only been away from home on Christmas four times. It was just a given that the family spent time together on that holiday. Even after they divorced, Mom and Dad set aside their differences on the big day, spending that time together for my brother and I.
After chronicling my first Christmas away from family, I thought about the other three years I wasn’t home. The second was in 2007 when I’d moved to Virginia. That was not as difficult because I’d had a wonderful time meeting my girlfriend’s family in Cleveland over the holiday.
The following year, however, I was single (if you’re reading this blog, you’ve picked up on a trend for much of my adult life before I met my wife). As I often did on Dec. 25 in those days, I was working with a skeleton crew to finish the sports section. I was more than willing to work that shift instead of staying in my apartment alone, thinking about how much I missed my family.
By 2009, I’d moved to Tulsa to work at The World. My goal that year was to drive to brother’s house on Christmas Eve, spending time with his family and my parents the next day to end my stretch of not seeing them on Christmas.
Unfortunately, a massive snow storm swept through northern Oklahoma and Kansas that night. Even if I’d thought about driving to northeast Kansas, I never would have made it because Highway 75 was closed for hours.
Finally, in 2010, I was home for the holidays. I’d left the newspaper business several months earlier to be closer to family. There was also a girl in the mix, though it wasn’t exactly a strong relationship.
By that December, I was in a bad place. Honestly, I was mostly miserable. After four months of living with Dad, I’d moved to Topeka, where I had a tiny apartment and a dead-end job as a contractor. I was making very little money, had no benefits and was scraping by.
To make matters worse, the aforementioned relationship was a train wreck that finally ended a few weeks before Christmas. Needless to say, I wasn’t a happy camper and didn’t have much holiday spirit.
As I’d done in the past, I spent Christmas Eve with my brother’s family. That usually meant sleeping on the couch with the kids scattered around me on the living room floor in sleeping bags.
For a few weekends leading up to that day, I’d been exchanging messages and texts with a friend from high school. On Christmas Eve, she was 15 miles away in Burlingame with her parents and kids. We spent hours texting that night, me with my phone under the covers to avoid waking up my niece and nephews.
Within a few weeks, the friend from high school, Shana, asked me out. Several months later, we were living together. A year after that night of exchanging texts, we spent our first Christmas together.
That Christmas in 2011 was an eye-opener. I went from having one Christmas to making five stops. There was the one I’d done for years at my brother and sister-in-laws, the Christmas for our family at our apartment, one with my mother, one with her parents and a large party that night to top it off.
It was a long way from being lonely the previous three years. It’s a crazy, hectic day we’ve had every Christmas for the last nine years. A day full of family. I can’t imagine it being any other way now.