Our Not So Traditional Christmas

Our Christmas plans didn't exactly go the way we wanted this year. I should have known better than to try and plan for anything while flying standby. I had planned on being at home in northern Michigan on Christmas day, but that didn't pan out as planned.

The prices for airline tickets were crazy high over the holidays (like they normally are), so I thought I'd chance it and fly as a non-revenue passenger. That was a great, good, and bad idea all at the same time. It's much cheaper to fly that way, but you're also at the mercy of so many unpredictable factors like weather, flight loads, holiday travelers, etc. Unfortunately, I ended up buying a last minute one way ticket back to Denver (which was surprisingly cheap for such a last minute purchase), because the flight was filling up and flying standby wasn't happening. If the flights hadn't looked full for days on end during the holidays, I would have stayed in Michigan. However, I wanted to spend Christmas and New Years with my husband, so back to Colorado we went.

That being said, Nate and I flew back to Denver extremely early on Christmas morning. We woke up at 2am (that was my bedtime in college) in order to return our rental car and make the 4 hour drive to the airport in Detroit. Nate made an earlier flight than me, so I had some hours to kill at 4am in the Detroit airport. What better time than 4am to wander around the airport taking pictures with a borrowed digital camera, right? After killing a few hours taking photos and chatting with the gate agent in Detroit, I boarded my flight (which was crazy full due to lots of passengers re-routing their flights due to cancellations through Atlanta) and headed home to meet Nate in Denver. Thank goodness I bought that last minute ticket back home.

Due to sheer exhaustion, we had a quiet and sleepy Christmas this year. After spending all day traveling, we both napped during the afternoon. Feeling the need to do something Christmas-y on Christmas day, we took a drive to see an amazing display of lights. By chance, Nate had heard on the radio about two houses that went in on a display together. We made the drive on Christmas evening, and enjoyed a light display set to music. Unfortunately our camera's memory card was full, so I only had room for one video of the lights... but, I did get a pretty good video!

After getting our Christmas light fix, we decided to eat dinner out since our refrigerator and pantry were barren after being away from home for so long. I thought for sure that it was going to be easy to find somewhere to eat dinner, but boy was I wrong. We drove around a couple of towns, and Nate was running low on patience and his tummy was rumbling. It took some convincing to try one more area, and low and behold we found ourselves not one but two Asian food restaurants that were open on Christmas evening! A little pad thai and sesame chicken on Christmas never hurt anyone. We both had a good laugh, because the family in the movie A Christmas Story ate at an Asian restaurant on Christmas evening too. They really are the only places open on Christmas. :)

We had ourselves a nice little Christmas, even though it was not the most conventional one ever. It was definitely a fun and interesting Christmas this year.

Do you have any Christmas stories of a not so traditional Christmas?