Kersplat!

My mom has always liked to do the Twelve Days of Christmas during the holidays.

There have been countless holidays where we have found a family in need and delivered gifts and goodies to them as the holiday approached. There are a lot of special memories associated with this--sneaking up to the house, assembling gifts, that one bitter time when we delivered soda (a most coveted thing growing up) knowing that it was for somebody else.

Once I wrote the most ridiculous poem talking about how we were their Christmas elves here to wish them Happy Holidays. I even wrote each alternating paragraph in red or green ink . . . talk about the epitome of festive. My mom was proud of that poem, weirdly enough, and had a lady from our ward who had stopped by our house one night read it. She wasn't as impressed and even pointed out a mispelled word. Scrooge.

The best memory I have of the Twelve Days of Christmas happened when I was super young, maybe five or six. My mom had baked bread and we were delivering this bread to a family with eight kids (sounds like one loaf wasn't enough, don't you think?) on a cold December evening in the great place of Eagle River, Alaska.

Like I said, it was cold. So guess who was persuaded to deliver the bread? My dad.

He snuck up to the house, left the bread on the doorstep, and knocked loudly on the door. The next thing I see is him racing off the front porch, down the front walk, and through the gate towards our car. Everything was fine until WHAM! My dad had run into the mailbox and landed right on his back.

I'm not sure if he slipped on ice or literally ran into the mailbox in the heat of the moment . . . I was five, you see.

Here's what I can tell you with a surety--my dad was immediately on his hands and knees patting the ground trying to find his glasses in the snow. Time progressed--it felt like eons--as my dad patted (there really is no better word) the ground looking for those damn glasses. What kills me is he doesn't even have that bad of vision. Those glasses must have blended into the night.

The family, by this time, had opened the door and come out to the porch. Rather than noticing the loaf of bread wrapped in tin foil, they were granted with a different surprise--some random man on his hands and knees in the snow becoming increasingly irritated as he patted the snow. Curse words, I'm sure, were uttered.

As this was happening, a crazy woman was sitting in the front seat of our car laughing like crazy. Oh, wait, that was my mom. This may be the hardest she's ever laughed.

At the tender age of five, I was kind of alarmed by my mom laughing because I thought my dad was hurt; however, now, the image of my dad on the ground is automatically accompanied by the sound of my mom laughing. And I can't help but smile.