Well, I didn't make it out of here yesterday. And since this is a positive thread I won't go into why not.

I have a lot of Christmas Eve and Christmas memories and it would be difficult to pick out one in particular. There was the time that my brother in law broke his elbow while sledding. There was the year we put sleigh tracks and reindeer poop on the roof complete with foot prints leading to the chimney. There was the year when I heard sleigh bells in the night. I remember my older daughter's first Christmas and then her dealing with her sister's first Christmas.

Picking one, I guess, it would be the year we got our snowmobile. This was in 1968, I was 16, and we lived in New Limerick, Aroostook County (The County), Maine. My three sisters and I kept pestering our parents that year to buy a snowmobile, a "sled". (In The County a snowmobile is called a sled). Back then only Bombardier, Actic Cat, and Polaris were available. We didn't care which one we got.

On Christmas morning we got up in a rush and ran to check in the dooryard. No sled. We jumped into coats and boots and ran through blowing snow to look in the barn and then the various sheds and out buildings. No sled. We were disappointed but then, it was Christmas and no disappointment lasts. We opened the presents under the tree and as we were finishing Dad said there was one more present in the tree. He reached into the branches and took down a set of keys dangling from a tiny plastic sled.

After wolfing down breakfast we drove to a neighbor's house and there in HIS barn sat our new sled. It was a beautiful bright yellow Bombardier 12 horsepower dream boat. We argued over who would drive it home and Dad settled it by flipping coins. My sisters won, darn it! I still have the sight of them driving off in that sled burned into my brain.

Remember the comment above about blowing snow? As the day progressed it settled down into a real County blizzard. Dad and I fought the pickup to the bottom of the hill and left it there with the car. Two days later when the storm blew itself out we had six foot drifts across the driveway. We were well and truly snowed in. Those drifts were packed in so tightly that I could walk on them and not sink deep into the snow. In the month and a half that followed the sled was our only way up and down the hill to where the cars were parked. We used it to carry groceries and when the heating oil ran low we strapped a fifty five gallon drum to a toboggan and towed that up and down the hill. It wasn't until mid February that we fianlly got the driveway cleared by a bulldozer. Nothing else could shift all that snow.

Oh, and Dad still has that sled. He quit using it about two or three years ago.

Merry Christmas.