The Twelve Felonies of Christmas
Peter B. Steiger
12/27/03

I suppose what we did to celebrate Christmas wasn't really a felony, and
in retrospect I guess there weren't twelve of them, and we were only
accessories to one of them... but I still broke more laws this Christmas
than ever before.

Amazingly, the week did NOT start with or at any point involve crawling
under the house in freezing weather with plumbing supplies and our Daffy
Duck hair dryer to repair frozen pipes.

In fact, materially speaking it was a great Christmas, thanks largely to
miscommunication between my wife and her sister about some large sums of
money that the sister was throwing around indiscriminately. I'm still not
sure how we came out ahead on that deal, but we did.

This was our first Christmas in our new house on our own land, a little
blotch of 8 acres out west of town in the aptly named "Happy Valley"
subdivision (my wife claims she has never heard of that term for an insane
asylum, but her father and I both get a kick out of it). We had snow,
sleds, a beautiful view, and vacation time to burn before the end of the
year. So I took Friday off with plans to put those new sleds to good use
(or bad, depending on how you look at it).

Thursday morning the kids did NOT wake us up at 5:30 AM to open presents,
and I'm sure the earplugs, barbed wire blocking their path through the
hall, and deadbolt on our bedroom door had nothing to do with that fact.
When we did let them into the living room, they ripped through the
presents in their usual sober, leisurely manner and eleven seconds later
they were ready to play outside.

We tested the sleds on the 1 centimeter of snow scattered loosely around
our yard on the rolling hills that comprise most of the land, then Sylvia
decided we should go into town to look at Christmas lights.

Off we went, warbling out Christmas carols in joyous dissonance until we
got to Cheyenne; then we drove around at random oohing and aahing at
appropriate intervals to keep my bride happy. At one point we thought it
would be fun to disturb others at home with their families, so we drove up
to the pastor's house and belted out more of our greatest Christmas hits
until he started pointedly looking at his watch. We went to the homes of a
few more friends from our church, but they wisely had their lights off and
pretended not to be home when we drove up.

On the way back to our own home we drove past the nearly deserted mall and
department store parking lots (of course the bars were doing a booming
business) and I remarked how it used to be when folks wanted to give their
kids driving lessons they only had to wait until Sunday when all the
stores were closed; now with 24 hour service 7 days a week, you had to
wait for Christmas to find an empty mall parking lot.

It's funny how a casual remark made conversationally can change your whole
life. Little did I realize that my wife, who is quite fanatical about
preserving our childrens' health and safety at all times, would take my
remark to heart and decide, at 8 PM on Christmas day, to give our
extremely silly 14.725 year old daughter her first driving lesson with no
warning, preparations, crash helmets, or anything else you would associate
with giving a teenager driving lessons. Off we went to the nearest big
parking lot; wife got in the back seat and daughter, barely 3 feet tall,
got in the front seat of our 1979 Cadillac that is slightly smaller than
the space shuttle. I have never seen that child's eyes so big before in
her life.

Thus we observed Christmas day by breaking the law - we let an unlicensed,
underage driver tool around a parking lot for a few minutes. She actually
did remarkably well, and I'm sure the drivers of the imaginary oncoming
traffic will forgive her for her inexperience once their imaginary
injuries heal.

Friday morning was my turn to get everyone up early, since, as a loyal
Canadian citizen, I felt obliged to get full mileage out of Boxing Day. We
certainly have enough boxes since we are less than halfway done with our
perpeptual move from old house to new. Unfortunately I have no idea what
else is involved beyond the boxes, so most of the morning was spent
watching violent war movies and bouncing on huge mounds of discarded
wrapping paper in the living room. We saw Sylvia off to work, then
immediately rushed to get our sleds in the other car and head off for a
public "winter sports" park somewhere between 10 and 50 miles from our
house.

I should have known it would be easy to spot; of the 60,000 or so
residents of Cheyenne at least 149,000 were there at the same park using
the sleds they also got for Christmas.

I'm not sure how they do it - it's been in the 40's for the past two weeks
since our last snowfall, and almost nothing is left of that snow in town
or on our property. But here in a park 30 miles out of town the snow is
still deep enough to go over the tops of your boots and freeze your toes
within seconds after stepping out of the car.

The park is not actually free; there's a parking fee that somehow involves
putting in money to get a ticket to put on your car. The problem was,
there were no tickets, no instructions, and no way to give money or prove
that we paid. I asked a few others what to do and they all expressed
surprise that the 8 foot tall sign with letters visible from the next
county actually meant they were supposed to pay, so I gave up. Thus we
committed our second crime in two days; we did not pay a parking fee to
use the park.

I'll get to my numerous injuries in a minute, but for now I might as well
get the last crime out of the way, accessory to arson. See, even though it
was no colder than 40 degrees out, all that snow made for a mighty cold
day and my only thought at finding a campfire at the foot of the slope was
gratitude that I could dry my gloves and warm my hands a bit. I didn't
even think about what a bad idea that fire was until my kids reported that
the people who built the fire decided to leave, and let the fire keep
burning after they left. There was some disagreement among the people
involved that ended with "No, let's just leave it... it will burn itself
out."

This despite the fact that the wind was picking up and blowing the flames
to less than a foot away from the overhanging branches... in a national
forest, I might add.

I figured people were still using the fire, so I didn't give it another
thought while I threw myself down steep, bumpy hills at 720 miles an hour
and tore up every muscle from my chin to my knees. But when I went back to
the fire, another guy came up with his kids and I quickly made sure he
knew that I didn't start the fire, nor did I think that was a smart place
to put it. I also started worrying what would happen if we just left it
for someone else, so after some agonizing over the right choice I figured
I would head up the mountain one more time to see if the remaining
families wanted to take charge of the fire for their own use and put it
out before they left. It should tell you how much pain I was in that I
chose to walk back down rather than go for another wild ride down the
trail.

Much to my surprise, that other guy was the only family left; I saw the
only other vehicle besides his and mine leaving the parking lot. I let him
finish drying his hands, then I set to work as hard as I could, ordering
the kids to throw snow on each log and ember until the fire was completely
out. What an exhausting job! All that pointing and directing made my
fingers and throat weary from effort.

We loaded up the car and managed to slide it across the now dark parking
lot to the main road and got home with almost no further catastrophes. We
were frozen half to death but at the same time warmed by the feeling that
we had observed the birth of Christ the way it was meant to be observed:
with reckless driving, irresponsible sledding, and a narrowly averted
forest fire.