Many people look forward to the magic of the holiday season. The light snow falling and bundling everything up, the anticipation of opening presents under the attentive eyes of parents waiting for a reaction and the warm glow of the television playing Die Hard on mute, or perhaps it’s been set to a fireplace screen saver for that extra comfiness. Most cherish these rare memories, but unfortunately, reality doesn’t always quite line up to expectations. Your dad’s car skids off the snowy driveway, your grandmother buys you a knockoff Game Boy, the Christmas tree falls on you, your cousin Rudolph gets indicted for fraud on Christmas or Mr. Little keeps insisting that Santa Claus isn’t real; all kinds of stuff can happen. It is a sad but all too often true tale—holidays can easily go from bad to worse.
Senior Cameron Wheeler
“The most disastrous one I can think of is when I was eight. It was Christmas morning and I was excited because of Christmas. I rushed out to our living room, I saw our stocking, and I went for it first because it was huge and I was like, “There’s got to be something cool in there.” It was on the mantel and I was eight and not that tall, so I took it down as carefully as I could. I wasn’t that successful, and the stocking hanger fell and broke part of my foot. Three toes to be exact. I spent the rest of Christmas morning at the doctor’s office getting my toes taped up. Recently I was baking peppermint brownies and broke the exact same three toes.”
Senior Dakota McLean
“I was in sixth grade, and we have a white Christmas tree every single year. Well, my cats decided that it would be a perfect time to take down the Christmas tree and pee all over it to the point where it was basically a yellow Christmas tree…. I heard it crash, and I was just laying in my bed. I was like, ‘Well, it’s not too bad, it’s probably just the cats playing around.’ And this was the day before Christmas, so we didn’t have enough time to go out and buy another Christmas tree, and we were having family guests over. So we had to quickly get rid of the tree and come up with a story, saying, ‘Oh, we lost a few of the ornaments on the side, and the branches were being terrible and they were falling out, you know, it was a really low budget Christmas tree, and we really didn’t want to do it.’”
Science teacher Stephanie Cifers
“I set myself on fire at Christmas. I had this really big sweater with really long sleeves on it, and I had this bowl shaped candle, and I was going to light the bowl shaped candle with another candle. I grabbed the candle and tipped it over because I thought the flame would tip over with it, but that’s not how fire works, so it stayed upright. It caught my sleeve on fire, and the flame just shot straight up my arm. So I was running around the house waving my arms like a chicken with one of them on fire until I was tackled by my brother with a blanket and he put it out. I didn’t get hurt from it, but it definitely ruined one of my favorite sweaters of all time, so that was kind of sad. Just a little bit of my pride, gone.”
Senior Brennen McAllister
“So it’s the week before Christmas, [seventh grade], and my Spanish teacher has us writing letters to people who we wanted to thank for allowing us to have a good year. So I decided to write this love letter to this girl I like, you know, just playing around. I said, ‘You’re beautiful, you should definitely date me, I have abs, I’m sexy.’ You know, all that teenager stuff. So I wrote two letters, one for my teacher, and the other one I just threw in the trash. I was just joking around—it was just rants and giggles. So, one of my friends took the letter out of the trash, put it in a pink envelope and wrote, ‘To my dear love.’ He gave it to the girl, and I had no idea. Later, when I would try to talk to her, she didn’t even want to talk to me, and I was just, like, ‘What’s happening?’ And later, one of her friends was like, ‘You’re a creep man, a true creep. She has a boyfriend.’”
– Compiled by Parker Pschorr
