I was wandering the house at 2:30 in the morning looking in every possible place I could think of for the stocking stuffers I’d been so careful to buy ahead of time, trying to be prepared.  We were supposed to drive to the airport in only an hour and a half. I hadn’t yet gotten even one minute of sleep for the night. It was an inauspicious start to our Christmas vacation. Our house isn’t very big and if there were that many possible places to hide things, I would be using those places for storage instead.

I concluded that they must’ve been stolen out of our car when I was unloading it. It wasn’t the first time Christmas had brought thieves to our neighborhood. If we were smart, we’d have our whole car and house rigged with Kevin McCallister-style traps. But there was no time for that now. It was time to wake our two toddlers for a 4am drive to the airport.

My husband dropped me, my younger son, and our bags off at the shuttle stop in long term parking. He would find a parking space and hoof it with our 18-month-old riding on his chest. We knew we were tight on time, but I’d checked in ahead on my phone so I thought we would still be just fine.

My three-year-old insisted on rolling my bag for me. He even tried his best to maneuver it up the escalator but ended up dropping the bag. I was anxious, but tried to be patient as a kind stranger caught the bag and carried it up, even joining us for an extra level to see that it made it all the way to our destination. My three-year-old turned to the stranger and said “thank you for helping me” with a tender politeness that melted my heart. I didn’t want to hurry him when he was doing such a good job.

If I’d known arriving at the check-in desk five minutes sooner would’ve been the difference between seeing his face on Christmas morning or not, I would’ve pushed a little harder.

My one worry with our timing was that they wouldn’t be able to get our bags on the plane. Imagine my surprise when our bags rode cheerfully away down the conveyor belt, I breathed a sigh of relief, then the check-in lady turned to us and said, “You can’t get on this plane”.

“What?”

But the bags. I was worried about the bags and we got them there in time. We were in the clear.

“It’s close enough now to departure time that we can’t issue any more boarding passes.”

Just moments before, I’d heard the other check-in lady call the gate and say, “We have some runners coming your way, name is Scoresby.” We are the Scoresbys and we were ready to run. I already had “Run, Run Rudolph” playing on full blast in my head.

“But there’s still 45 minutes before the flight leaves.”

“The gate is a mile and a half from here.”

“You don’t have golf carts or anything?”

“No”

“What if someone was having a heart attack, would the doctor have to run a mile and a half to help them?”

“Well, no, we have golf carts for that.”

We were willing to run. I was even willing to cover the gap at a gallop and save my snark about the Salt Lake Airport’s massive design flaws for later. But they wouldn’t even let us try for it. No amount of angry, sleep-deprived tears from me, or calm, kind gratitude from my husband swayed them.

We watched the minutes tick by with our plane still on the ground while they rebooked us tickets on two different planes that would cut full days out of an already very short trip. I would go ahead with our baby that didn’t need his own seat and Bryan would follow the next evening with our older toddler. They gave us a digital fistful of meal vouchers as an “I’m sorry” and sent us away.

We decided to dig in and make the most of it. We ate heaping piles of pancakes at Denny’s, went home for a much-needed family nap, and when the time for the first flight came, the baby and I went off to the airport with meal vouchers in hand and decided to be foodies. My husband decided to have a special slumber party with pizza and ice cream with our other son. Our schedule had already been cleared; we were trying to fill it with fun.

Throughout the day, my husband and I texted pictures back and forth about the things we were doing in our unexpected one on one time with our boys. “S picked out some potato chips to spend his voucher on and is now trying to share them with random strangers.” “B is loving the water feature at R.C. Willey.” “S and I are finally trying that ‘world famous’ mac and cheese at the Seattle airport.” “B and I are setting up the blow-up mattress in the TV room at your parents’ house”

“These boys have a lot to say if we pay attention and stop loading the dishwasher, looking at screens or being distracted by a puppy.”

His text said just what I was thinking. Being my second child, I’d never spent so much time one on one with my baby as I did that day. I never realized how clearly he communicated every preference despite knowing so few words. Never knew how much of a ham he was until I watched him stick out his tongue and push out his tummy, waddling around trying to make strangers in the terminal laugh.

The texts between us continued. “We should do this more often; one on one time with our boys; more mommy/son dates and daddy/son dates.” I had learned the lesson of our Christmas delay. We could move forward with our holiday together.

But the text that came the next day told me the lesson wasn’t over. It was just a screenshot from my husband’s email:

“We’re sorry: your flight is canceled.”

It was December 23. All the flights routed through Portland and Seattle were cancelled because of an ice storm. There aren’t many other ways to get to Anchorage from Salt Lake City. Bryan called customer service. The expected hold time was eight and a half hours. He tried their online chat service, the chat ended as soon as it started and the whole feature was soon turned off. He decided to drive straight to the airport to talk to them in person. Thankfully our three-year-old thinks escalators are basically an amusement park ride so he did not complain.

The best he could come up with was driving to Las Vegas, flying to Chicago and spending the night there and then flying from there on an itinerary that would bring him in at midnight on Christmas Eve and cost us $1800 beyond the money we had already spent on the tickets. It would be a true “mother getting home to her son in Home Alone” itinerary. I half expected him to be routed through Sheboygan via a box truck full of small-town polka stars.

Ultimately, it didn’t seem worth it to put our toddler through that much travel and spend that kind of money when they could go to Christmas Eve at my parents’ home.

So, it was decided. We would be spending Christmas with each other’s families, apart.

Our little valley in Alaska was being pounded by a merciless windstorm. I lay awake late into the night listening to it howl, holding my snoozing baby close, and letting disappointed tears flow. I couldn’t believe that just a week before I had been so overwhelmed by the noise and the pulling and the prodding of young motherhood that I’d physically run from the room and closed myself in the garage because I needed space so badly and no one would give me any.

Now, I wasn’t going to see my three-year-old’s face on Christmas morning and I realized just how much I’d rather have the problems of his presence than the problems of his absence. I ached with how much I missed him and thought about how this year has just been one long marathon of reversals of fortune and cried a little more.

My in-laws are truly salt of the earth people. It was not a burden to be with them. But it was a heavy burden to be without the others I had hoped to be with. I had to come back for the play I’m currently performing in, but I didn’t want my husband to be cheated out of time with his family, so he flew up as I flew back down. It is now December 30 and besides a serendipitous passing of ships when I got off the same plane my husband and toddler were about to board to go the other direction and had 20 minutes of snuggles in the terminal, I haven’t gotten any time with my son since I flew away on December 22.

Walking through the terminal in Anchorage after Christmas, I thought about how much we expect out of holidays. How we take great care to decorate weeks (sometimes a month or two) ahead of time and pack each day leading up to them with anticipation and celebration. We go into this time of year with such high hopes for all that it can be. Holidays break up our years and give us something to look forward to. Their novelty and joy slow time for just a moment, so we can stop and take stock of our lives. We step out of the current and see if we still like where we’re going. And obviously, we celebrate Christmas specifically as a way to remember and ponder on the birth of Jesus Christ.

I may not have gotten to see my toddler’s face when he saw Christmas morning, but being isolated in Alaska during a storm that kept knocking out the power and created snowdrifts so large they completely covered the doors to the Church, did give me that holiday moment to step out of the current.

And what I felt, as I watched the river continue flowing by, was that I don’t value what I have nearly enough. I am in a stage of motherhood that I fondly call a “test of endurance”. I feel overwhelmed and overstimulated and overstressed so, so much of the time. It’s easy to wish I was elsewhere. And yet, when the weather and the airlines and the fates put me elsewhere, I realized just how much I don’t want to be anywhere, but with my little, growing family.

I stopped in a little airport shop and spotted a sticker that said “Counting my Lucky Stars, Alaska”. It was silly expensive, but I bought it anyway to remember that feeling. The feeling of a Christmas that taught me to hold my babies a little closer and remember to be grateful even for the hard days because a life made hard by someone little that loves you too much are hard days worth having. And a Christmas that helps you remember to appreciate those days, may have turned out to be a good Christmas after all.