When I turned 25, I was feeling rather old and wise, and I had planned to do a post on here to reflect on some of the things I've learned in my short adulthood while they're still fresh in my memory. I ultimately shelved the project for the time being, because I didn't want it to come across too preachy, and also because I felt like I still have a lot more learning to do that might make future me cringe when reading past me's writing.
I'm glad I shelved it, because I was right. There is still a lot more to learn.
At least, that's what I thought. Until Christmas Day, 2022.
The Yankee Swap
"Where are you gonna be?"
"Who's gonna be where?"
"Where are you going when?"
"So what time are you coming?"
"What time are you leaving?"
"Are you gonna miss __________? You better not miss __________."
But alas, the things we do for family.
Sydney's grandparents have a tradition of going to Midnight Mass* (*not really at midnight) on Christmas Eve. So generally, we exchange our own presents with each other on December 23, we have my parents exchange Sydney's presents on Christmas Eve morning, Sydney and I quickly leave New York and return to Ontario, attend Mass and quickly exchange presents with her parents, and then I return home to New York on Christmas morning to exchange presents with my parents all by my lonesome. It's our take on the old Christmas classic, Yankee Swap. Only the Yankee being swapped is me. :(
*Murmurs* But why, Tyler? Can't she just come back with you?
Unfortunately, it didn't work out this year.
The Christmas "Miracle"
...The OREO factory can't make a package of 12 OREOs in 21 days. Okay...
So, I was feeling a bit down in the dumps since this was about to be the coup de grâce to my old-fashioned Griswold family Christmas, especially since the other gift I bought her was a dinosaur-shaped nacho bowl named Nachosaurus. Classy. Still, I was looking forward to restoring our tradition of Mass, which had been canceled the previous two years due to Covid. Sydney also hadn't seen her family in over a month and was homesick, so it was set to be joyous holiday reunion that could hopefully make up for my gift failings.
A winter storm rolled in on the evening of December 23, and Syracuse was spared the worst of it, but the conditions our were admittedly not ideal. No biggie, I thought. As we know, I've driven through a hundred of these blizzards. The next day, Christmas Eve, was a Saturday, so there weren't a lot of news reports coming out (presumably since many people were off), but the occasional scroll on my phone was bringing in some really gut-wrenching stories: rumors of people freezing to death in Buffalo, trapped in their cars or in businesses, people holed up in Targets and Walmarts in the bedding aisles. It was some nasty stuff that made me nervous; but still, I thought the worst of it had missed us. Buffalo was two hours away in the other direction.
But, during gift exchange #3 on Christmas Eve morning, the call came down that Ontario Highway 401, the busiest highway in the world and the only route from Kingston to the U.S. border, was completely closed and impassable to all traffic, and plows had been pulled off the roads for their own safety. Being a bit of a miser, a scrooge, we'll say, I understood but was a little annoyed. For whatever reason, Canada has a habit of struggling to maintain its own infrastructure, in my opinion. I often think back to the rain storm the night I met my now-wife back in 2018. A little rain completely downed power in the capital city of the country, a city of over a million people, for over a day? Oh, and how does a country even possibly get a backlog of 300,000 passport renewals? And now you're telling me that we're going to close the country's most important road and not even bother to plow it because of some snow? You know, just a white guy complaining about first-world problems.
But more importantly, Syd was devastated by the news that she wouldn't get to see her family, and because of the holiday, there was little to no information about when this thing might let up. Regardless, there was no chance of us getting there since the road was completely closed, so we were effectively snowed in. My parents were gracious enough to extend an invitation to Christmas Eve dinner to us, but it did not seem fair that I had gotten to see my family at least once a week for over a month and Syd was trapped from seeing hers. Two hours never felt so far away--a familiar feeling. So in solidarity with her, we decided to go to the grocery store and get some fixings to make our own Christmas Eve dinner of shrimp tacos and chips and salsa, and have it alone in our apartment.
We enjoyed our quiet night in, really the first quiet night we had ever had on Christmas Eve, and the first time we had ever gotten to spend Christmas Eve completely together. While enjoying The Santa Clause (again) and our shrimp tacos, the doorbell rang. Special delivery...from OREO.
We couldn't spoil dinner with dessert, though. We needed something to eat our chips and salsa out of first. So I found it appropriate to get over my embarrassment and dig out the gift I had been planning to return:
C-Day
Until it wasn't.
Pictures don't quite do justice for the situation that we ended up in, a situation which I could only describe as utter bedlam. In a span of about three miles, visibility had gone from 100 to 0 percent, roads had gone from clear to impassable, the temperature dropped about 10 degrees Fahrenheit (possibly more with wind chill), and wind gusts of about 70mph/110 km/h were sending terrifying gusts of snow, over 10 feet high, hurling toward us.
I opened with my story at the beginning about being young and thinking people are invincible, because this was the day that I learned we aren't. I opened with my view of the past few years as nothing really surprising me anymore, because this might be the first time I was truly surprised in years. It was harrowing yet somehow still beautiful in the way that only Christmas snow is. Stark, really, is the only word I have for it.
There were more cars off the road than on it. Some were already long-abandoned and buried above my head with snow, but we also witnessed many slide off the road before our eyes, like dish soap running off a plate. The visibility was what got to me, and it was all of about five minutes before I called it quits, and by the grace of someone or something we made it off the Arsenal Street exit from I-81 in Watertown, and slid into the only parking lot that was visible, let alone accessible, a 7-Eleven. Every other building and parking lot was completely buried, to the roof. Some of the snow was so high it was touching the power lines. I had never seen anything like it.
Being Christmas Day, those businesses wouldn't have been open anyway. But it was still a frustrating, helpless feeling we had, stranded at a 7-Eleven, trying to get word from weather reports or emergency responders, and there were none. We tuned to one channel which briefly mentioned "It's a little snowy out there!" and I laughed out loud at the absurdity. I couldn't believe we were in a blizzard that had gone completely undetected, and which nobody seemed to care about.
For the next three hours, we chatted with our fellow man, Americans and Canadians stranded together in a 7-Eleven with one working coffee machine and a not-so-cheery manager. We didn't talk about much, just where we were from, where we were going, and why. Everybody seemed to have a similar story to ours, but we couldn't help but keep finding parallels to one particular story--the Nativity story, being stuck at the inn in Bethlehem.
After three hours, many of those customers had come and gone, deciding to press their luck and brave the storm. Still in shock, I didn't agree with their decisions. But people kept telling us we were in the middle of a small, isolated, albeit mighty squall. If we could make it out the other side, about 20 miles/30 kilometers, the roads would be clear again. I barely passed science class in school but the logic seemed to track with me, since the conditions before we got there were clear, and Watertown sits nestled in America's worst snow belt, wedged between Lake Ontario and the Tug Hill plateau.
Armed with only a snow brush and an instant espresso, I went "full send" on the Christmas blizzard of 2022, as the zillennials say. With the defroster on blast and my head completely out the window, I slipped and slid my way back onto I-81, much to the disappointment of an onlooking state trooper.
The Final Stretch
That was when one unassuming Good Samaritan, whose name I didn't catch, recognized the impending danger, and just so happened to be armed with a shovel. He trekked down 20 feet of buried road and began shoveling, enough for a police cruiser to make it down and rescue the trapped truck driver, and enough for cars to get out around the incapacitated trailer. You wouldn't have heard it among the insulated silence of the blanketing snow, but we were cheering loudly for this guy. He was our hero. Another Christmas Miracle. Because we were parked at the front of the convoy, though, it was up to us to lead the pack out of there to safety. Just two lost kids guiding a caravan of other lost families through a tundra-laden twilight with the brake lights of a Kia Soul.
Head out the window and my glasses off, I cleared snow out of my eyes with one hand while the other was on the wheel. During those intense 20 miles, I gradually realized that Syd and I were learning the true meaning of Christmas.
I'm not gonna go all Charlie Brown on everybody about the woes of commercialization, which is a separate issue, but I will say that Christmas has become so much about tradition and pageantry, about doing the "proper" things with the "proper" people. So caught up in having a "proper" Christmas, we forget about those who are having a not-so-traditional holiday: frontline workers and emergency responders, like plow drivers put in harm's way for travelers to pass through, or gas station managers there to give essential fuel and Doritos to those weary travelers, or the travelers themselves, perhaps with a seemingly unreachable destination, perhaps with no destination at all. For them, indeed, for us, Christmas can have a meaning that isn't under a tree or in a stocking, and Christmas dinner doesn't have to be a dressed turkey or ham--it could be grocery store frozen shrimp tacos.
I came to a realization that Christmas is about being grateful. It's about finding the good all around you--the light in the dark, the warmth in the cold, a helping hand in a hopeless situation. It's about hope itself, and believing in miracles. It's about birth and life, and the joy that these can bring, even in the most unlikely of situations, and how it can be okay to be 25 and not have all the answers yet.
This ordeal put a little into perspective for me about what is truly important. That day, it was family. I was sick of being divided between two families in two countries, and I needed to put an end to the madness of the Yankee swap once and for all. And so, after we finally made it out of the squall, trudged through five feet of snow to get to an open rest area to recuperate, and we had clear minds and bladders and were safely in Kingston, I decided it was finally time. Five days later, I presented myself at the border to complete my immigration interview and accept my Permanent Residence.
Final thoughts
What do the Holidays mean to you?