How do you follow a Christmas Eve spent at Best Buy threatening to rip people’s arms off? If you are my father then you cancel Christmas all together.

Many people who grew up with divorced parents know the alternate weekend and Wednesday evening routine. You spend every other weekend with your father and then Wednesday evenings at McDonald’s. In addition you either rotate holidays or split them as we did, by going with our father on Christmas Eve and our mother on Christmas.

The year after the Best Buy fiasco my father and I were discussing our Christmas Eve plans. It typically involved him picking us up (late), traveling about an hour away to visit his father in a nursing home and taking him to eat at the only place open in a small town on Christmas Eve - The Ferdy Flyer. As if the name doesn’t say enough, it was the kind of place that served homemade turtle soup if that gives you a good picture. But eventually The Ferdy owners decided to call it quits and then we were forced to find another place.

My father decided a tavern would be a good family choice. Don’t worry it had a family eating area. My brother and I sat in there drinking cokes and eating potato chips (because that is all they served), while my father and his dad sat at the bar drinking.

As we discussed the plans I asserted some common sense and asked if my brother and I could drive separately and meet him up there. My hope was that we could travel a little safer. My father saw it as, “just another instance where my mother could screw him out of the time he deserved.”

This argument went on for a while of course. I tried to explain we wanted to be back in time to attend Midnight Mass with my mom, which went over like a lead balloon. When I finally explained that his drunk driving scared the living heck out of me he had a serious come-a-part.

Despite everything I had thought about my father up to this point, he proved to have more control and power than I ever imagined. He canceled Christmas that year. No threatening to rip arms off, no tavern chips for dinner, no drunk driving….

It was the best darn present I ever got!

1 DAY LEFT TO ENTER!