A Christmas Story

All good Christmas stories come with a little mystery, magic, and miracle. This one has all three and took place right on a cold and frosty Sun City driveway one Christmas night five years ago.

Like most families, it’s been a longstanding tradition in ours to gather on Christmas Day. Our get-together is at my parents’ house (first in Park Ridge, where I grew up, and now in Sun City). The evening centers around opening stockings (sized for the Colossus of Rhodes) my parents pack full of trinkets for my and my siblings’ respective families. My own family being just my wife, me, and our dog, as we don’t have children yet, which for this story, is a good thing because kids would have knocked this magical Christmas experience into a complete and total lampoon.

This story does, however, contain our dog.

I pulled into my parents’ driveway. There’s snow on the ground, certainly ice beneath that. My wife was in the passenger seat and our dog, Ruppy, was in the back seat, along with a few bags of presents Ruppy found interesting at the onset of the trip from our house to my parents’. But she no longer found them interesting, because the car was stopping and she was whining to get out. It seems my parents’ house is Disney World for dogs.

Being the guy, it’s my job to manage the outfit, get everyone/everything from the car to the house. Be the dog walker, gift carrier, and wife bolster.

Anticipating this juggling act and knowing I wouldn’t have a hand free to lock the car once we and everything were out, I locked the doors to the car once we got them all open. I then stuffed the keys in my pocket, grabbed the bags of gifts with one hand, the dog’s leash with the other, and hipped the back passenger-side door (the final door) closed. I waited for my wife to carefully round the car through the snow and take my arm to go into the house. My dog pulling me one way, my wife pulling me the other, I started off, leading the journey to the front door, and I made it one step before abruptly stopping. I was caught on something.

When I turned around, I couldn’t believe the odds of what I saw. My coat was shut in the car door from when I’d hipped it closed, and the pocket with the keys was the part of the coat inside the car, thus making me the only person in the history of Christmases to lock his keys in the car while they were still on his person. I guessed this was what I got for never buttoning my coat. I could hear my mother chastising me all the way from my childhood.

So there I am on Christmas night, on my parents’ driveway, wife on one arm, gift bags in one hand, dog leash in the other, stuck to my car. It was like freezing my tongue to a flagpole only more embarrassing.

My wife, of course, started laughing, which spurred my dog to run around in circles through the snow, tugging at my arm like a fish on a line. “Come on, come on. Let’s go. I can smell food in there” was the look on my dog’s face.

I first tried pulling at my coat (with my body, because I still didn’t have a free hand), but the keys in my pocket created enough bulk to keep the pocket from slipping out.

I tried pulling harder, and, of course, my wife said, “Wait, you’re going to rip your coat,” which was hardly my concern at the moment.

By this time, my dog grew impatient, plopped her butt in the snow, stared at me, and proceeded to whine at me too.

Going and getting help was not an option either. In this situation, when the only help was 17 of your family members, would it be yours? I didn’t think so.

The door was shut surprisingly tight against the thickness of my coat, but my wife thought she might be able snake a slender finger into a tiny corner of the pocket still outside the car. After a few minutes of working on it, she was able to press the remote and unlock the doors, thus freeing me.

After twenty minutes in the driveway, we finally arrived in the house. My dog ran around like a mad little thing, searching for scraps and greeting everyone all at the same time. Within an hour’s time, she’d pass out in front of the fireplace, belly full and exhausted.

My family is a bunch of people who like to point out when you’re late, so, of course, when we finally walked in the door, everyone told me, “You’re late.”

“No we’re not,” I told them. “We got here twenty minutes ago.”

That’s just how long it took to get from the car to the door.

Whenever I relate this story to people (never before to this large an audience), I challenge them to do better than locking your keys in your car while they’re still on you, and I challenge each of you to do one better with your most outrageous story like this, Christmas or otherwise.

I met my match one day, though, at a friend’s wedding, when one of my old high school buddies said to me, “Oh yeah? Well, let me tell you about the time I ran myself over with my own car…”

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