It was Christmas of 1990. I'd been married to my current wife, Susan, for a couple of years. We were living in Pensacola, Florida with her two teenaged kids from her first marriage. My two somewhat younger kids from my own first marriage were living with their mother in Jacksonville, Florida, about 350 miles away. Our Christmas routine back then was to drive to Jacksonville on Christmas Eve, pick up my kids from my ex, drive to my parents' house (30 miles or so away) , do a Christmas Eve dinner and gift exchange with my family, spend the night, get up and drive back to Pensacola on Christmas Day with my kids in tow to spend a week with us. Then, on New Year's Day, my ex and I would meet midway between Pensacola and Jacksonville, in Tallahassee, and I'd pass the kids back off to her.

Well, in 1990, a freak winter storm system came through and dumped a couple of inches of snow on Interstate 10 between Pensacola and Tallahassee on the night of December 23. Yeah, I know a couple of inches of snow is no big deal in most places, but we're talking Florida here; no snowplows, no salt or sand trucks, no snow tires, lots of drivers who've never even driven on snow before. The Highway Patrol shut the Interstate down on Christmas Eve. There was no way to get across the state for Christmas.

So, we changed our plans and decided to just do the usual Christmas Eve thing on New Year's Eve instead. We wouldn't have as long a visit with my kids, but we'd at least get to see each other. So, we threw gifts and Susan's then 15 year-old son into my almost ten year-old Dodge van and drove to Jacksonville. We picked my kids up from their mom's, did the usual routine at my folks' place, took them back to their mom, and headed home around 2:00 PM or so on New Year's Day.

We'd gotten to a few miles beyond Tallahassee when the sun started going down and I turned the van's headlights on. As soon as I did, they began getting dimmer and the van started losing power. I flipped the lights back off and it ran better. Flipped them back on, and it tried to die. Well, I knew right then that I had an alternator problem and the engine was running off the battery. I didn't know if it was the alternator gone bad or if I'd only thrown a belt, but either way I needed to get off at the next exit before the battery ran out of power all together. We made it off the highway okay, pulled into a convenience store, opened the hood, saw that the alternator belt was okay, and basically said, "Shit! How are we gonna get an alternator replaced on New Years Day?" Well, the answer was, "We aren't."

The folks at the convenience store called a local repair guy for us. He came and confirmed that it was a bad alternator, but there was no way for him to get one that evening. He could do it the next day. "Well," I thought, "if that's how it's gotta be, that's how it's gotta be. We'll just get to a motel somehow and get back on the road after the repair's done." But I had forgotten one little detail; Susan was working as a substitute teacher at the time and she'd gotten an assignment teaching full-time for a semester, and school started tomorrow. She simply couldn't afford to miss the first day at work on a new job.

So, we called Susan's eighteen year-old daughter, who'd chosen not to make the trip with us, to come get us in Susan's car. We bought some magazines, sat down in the store's snack bar area, and began to while away the roughly three hours it would be until she got there. About two hours later, one of the store's clerks says we have a phone call. It was Susan's daughter who informed us that the car had shredded a tire about thirty minutes into the trip and, after putting the spare on, she had decided to go back home since there was no way to get a replacement tire on New Year's Day and it would be very unwise to drive that far with no spare. So, she had called a friend and he'd agreed to drive her to come after us in his car.

So, we killed another three hours or so until, at about midnight, Susan's daughter walked into the store and immediately asked if I had any duct tape in the van. Let me tell you something, when the first thing that comes out of someone's mouth is, "Do you have any duct tape?" you know something's not exactly right. I walked outside and there sat the car that she and her friend, Marty, had driven over; the one in which we were expected to ride almost 200 miles in 28°F (-4°C) weather in the wee hours of the morning. It was an orange Volkswagen "Thing" convertible, the closest thing to an absolute toy car that's ever been on the market. And what did they need that roll of duct tape for? Because the Thing has plastic windows and every one of them had been blown to friggin' shreds! The duct tape was needed to try and keep enough cold air out so that we would only freeze halfway to death instead of all the way. I knew without asking that the heater in the Thing didn't work. The heaters in VWs with air-cooled engines, no matter whether Thing, Beetle, or van, never worked

Fortunately, my van was used for camping so we had enough blankets and quilts in it to maybe keep us from freezing, so we bundled up and headed toward the Interstate with Marty driving. He made a right turn onto the Interstate entrance ramp, whereupon the left rear door of the Thing flew open, and Susan, who was sitting next to it, did her best to become a projectile. Luckily, I was sitting beside her and caught her by the jacket before she went fully airborne. "Oh yeah, "said Marty from the driver's seat, "be careful of that door. It doesn't shut very well." So, we used the rest of the duct tape on the door and somehow managed to make it home by about 3:00 AM, very cold and uncomfortable, but with no further attempted escapes and no toes frozen off.

We got, maybe, two hours sleep before we had to get up and go to work. Susan dropped me off at my job and headed for her new gig with instructions to get a new tire after work so we could go get the van if it was ready. I was managing a college bookstore at the time and, while January 2nd was a registration day and, therefore, fairly busy, the following day was the first day of classes and things were going to be really busy for a few days. I had to either go get the van that afternoon or wait a week or more. So, when the repair guy called about noon and said it was ready I bailed out of work, got someone to give me a ride home, and slept a few hours until Susan got home around 4:00 with four good tires on her car. We headed toward Tallahassee with the idea in mind that she'd sleep on the way there so she could drive her car back.

We got about two-thirds of the way there, stopped at a rest stop for a restroom break, got back in her car, turned the ignition key and... nothing. The ignition switch had been acting up for a few weeks, and it had finally decided it had had enough. We called a locksmith who was able to come replace it; a process which took two hours and a big chunk of the cash I had brought along to pay for the alternator replacement. (I was credit cardless at the time and neither the mechanic nor the locksmith wanted a Pensacola check.)

We finally made it to the mechanic's place to pick up the van around 9:00. He was nice enough to take part of his payment by check so we could buy gas to get home. We actually made it back home around midnight with no further incidents and actually got a reasonable amount of sleep.

Now, how does this mess qualify as a blue Christmas story? I guess because if it hadn't snowed on Christmas Eve, we would have made the trip a week earlier. Then, even if the van had broken down on the way home we would have had no really pressing need to get home and could have holed up in a motel for a day or so. It would have been less hassle, but the story wouldn't have been nearly as entertaining.