OT - What was the strangest Christmas you had?

[Flytyer37]

1962, Pomona, California. I was 4 years old. My father had his heel crushed in between some pipes at work three months before. The company's insurance didn't want to pay. He wasn't working. We were loosing everything.
My dad went out in the car on Christmas eve and found a Christmas tree for 50 cents at 9 oclock at night. He brought it home and my mom and dad decorated it with the Christmas cards we got from folks.
When we woke up Christmas morning, we three kids all opened our presents. Each of us got a sweater that my mom had knitted. These had been wrapped in the Sunday comics. We sat on orange crates (our furniture had been reposessed) and sang Christmas carols.
Looking back, I realized that the sweaters were knitted out of yarn that my mother had unraveled from two other sweaters. One of hers and my dad's favorite old fisherman's knit.
Its the Christmas that taught me the meaning of what Christmas is supposed to be and the one that I always compare every Christmas too. No other has matched it.
Frank Reid

[ranchwife]

My story doesn't compare to all the Christmas stories from our dear veterans, but it was one that sticks out in my mind. I was about 8 years old and my sister was about 5. About 2 AM the smoke alarm in the house started going off. It did what it was supposed to and woke all of us up. My parents and grandparents searched the house to see if there was actually a fire, but discovered that the batteries were going dead. Well, after that, there was no going back to sleep for my sister and I. We all ended up opening presents at about 3:00 in the morning!! That was the longest Christmas day!! As I look back on it now, my parents and grandparents were so tired the rest of the day!!

[gonfishn]

Ok not the strangest but to me the funniest.
To set the stage My wife is the soundest sleeper I've ever met she sleeps through alarm clocks,smoke detectors,telephone next to the bed etc.well a couple of years ago I woke up to the sound of wrapping paper being shredded and squeals of delight from my then 5 yr.old son I nudged my wife awake and told her the kids were opening presents,man she was out of bed like a shot.almost all of their presents were open.It turns out they had asked her if they could open them and in her coma she refers to as sleep she had said sure go ahead.Christmas is very important to my wife with a very well established protocol for opening presents,photos ooh and ahhing so to this day she can not understand why I was rolling on the floor laughing and why I wasn't upset about the whole incident

[hikepat]

At the ex inlaws for X-mas day. Nice fire going in the fire place as x-mas songs are playing. The inlaws forgot to clean the chimney that year. The fire department had to take it down because the fire within the chimney could not be put out any other way. A house full of smoke while we at our breakfast that morning but at least the house was saved.

In my youth we spent many a xmas days out on two diffrent boats one a 26 ft Bayliner and the other in later years a 28 ft Bayliner. We would spend X-mas at places like Longbranch WA and other places with not much for us kids to do but fish in the rain and cold and once or twice the snow. Mom always had to cook X-mas dinner on the boat and got pretty darn good cooking in that little oven a full X-mas dinner for four. Often the wind and cold would get kind of bad and at times even us kids were given hot buttered rum to help warm us up. Though we never got more then one cup each. By the way I spent many a Thankgiving this way to. Maybe that why to this day I often fish while the rivers are nice and open on the holidays and the family gets together on a diffrent day. This years its Saturday with fishing for me on Sunday.

[Grn Mt Man]

Dad passed away from a sudden heart attack one week before Christmas in 1977. Traveled about 500 miles home to New England with wife and two boys ages 16 and 13. Spent the week getting mom squared away, funeral arrangements, etc. Had to be back at work at the end of a week;so, had to leave to start home on Christmas morn. Spent Christmas day eating cold egg salad sandwiches etc, in the middle of a snowstorm, parked in a closed Sunoco gas station, somewhere off Interstate 88 halfway between Albany, NY and Binghamton, NY. Not the best obviously; but, qualifies for the strangest!

[white43]

There have been so many,like the time my first wife and I thawed the turkey on our back porch and went to retrieve it early Christmas morning for our first Christmas with her parents. We opened the bag and nothing was left. Neighborhood cats had cleaned every last scrap of meat off the carcass. A Christmas in Dubuque with a bunch of us newspaper bachelors was precious. But my first Christmas away from home while I was in the Army was incredible. About a month before I had met a Romanian girl who had come to Ft. Sheridan to meet another soldier who stood her up. We played some pool and just talked and got acquainted, and I walked her back to the train station and waited with her for her train. The weekend before Christmas she invited me to Chicago where she played tour guide and gave me a sweet kiss as I boarded the train back to the fort. That week she called and invited me to her family's home for Christmas. I traversed all of Chicago down to Stickney, nervously asking any and all talkative passengers en route if I was on the right bus, and where I had to get off, all of that, to where they lived and incredibly somehow met up with her. Christmas Eve and day I learned that a Romanian Christmas was a whole 180 from the way we had celebrated Christmas back on our family farm. Boistrous. Wall to wall food and cheer. Round after round of laughter. So many toasts I thought I'd die. The year was 1961 and served as my introduction into the beauty of other cultures -- which opened a whole new coursity about people, cultures and ways of living. For the past 16 years I have worked as a coordinator for an exchange student organization in my spare time, which I think started that day at Sandy Strupek's family in south Chicago. JGW

[Tyflyer]

Oh my, let's see, I was 16 years old and early Christmas morning I walked over to my step-brothers house until my parents got up. His wife was preparing to host the dinner and she took a break and poured herself and my step-brother a tall glass of rum. While they were in the livingroom, I thought I would have a glass also. I acted manly and drank it right down and poured another. No effect, tasted good! I think I had another, couldn't be sure. After some time, I headed back to the door and said goodbye and started walking home. I made it about 100 yards and passed out in the snow. I don't know how long I layed there, but I never touched rum again in my life. I couldn't even tell you what I got for Christmas that year.

Tyflyer

[GILs_GONE_WILD]

Christmas Eve day about fifteen years ago.

With a turbine or two off line, the power company used "rolling blackouts" of complete grids to ration the available electricity.

However, no one took into account that the 40, 50 & 60+ year old neighborhoods had 40, 50 and 60+ year old transformers. Since none of the homeowners turned off their thermostats, once power was turned back on to those "old" grids, the surge was WAY too much and the transformers couldn't take it. Sounded a lot like New Year's Eve not Christmas Eve.

The water bed's heat kept my wife and kids warm for a while but that eventually cooled down.

Needless to say we packed up the presents and stockings and spent the night at a friends house who lived across the street from a fire station.

Yep, if you were lucky enough to live in a grid that contained a hospital, fire department or police department your power wasn't turned off at all.

[SW Ladyfish]

The year we bought our old new house...1993~

The 3-story Pennsylvania bank house was built in 1845...and nothing much had been done since! We knew it needed a "little" work; but...

On Christmas Day we were standing in the kitchen crawl space looking all the way up to the roof trusses. I don't remember what we had for Christmas dinner; but, I know it was cooked on a Coleman stove. And we washed the dishes in the bathtub...

[Pete Hiatt]

Once on a trip to the Orient, I left Dec 24 and crossed the International dateline at Midnight which meant I went from Dec 24 directly to Dec 26 and totally missed Christmas.