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Christmas Eve Marathons Past

silent_nightWe didn’t believe in Santa. When we were young, Christmas Eve wasn’t about anticipating the clatter of hoofs and bells—it was all about the Christmas Eve services at church. My mom was a minister and we didn’t just go to one service, we went to all the services.

You had to have strategies. You had to have stamina. When my brother and I got older, we had to have jobs. One year we directed traffic at a fancy church that had over 5,000 people attending services. Stress, expensive cars, old people driving in the dark for that one special night of the year…yeah, nightmare. At that same church, one year we lit hundreds of those cute little bags with snowflake patterns and crosses cut out of them. When we finally finished they looked pretty damn magical, glowing along the path to the sanctuary, until one of the bags caught on fire and we had to stamp it out. We took bets during the service how many more would be alight when we got out.