What a Christmas

After two trips to the hospital, the Nichols’ family Christmas is complete.

The plan was to come up from Tuscaloosa to my grandmother’s house in Birmingham (about an hour away) to celebrate Christmas. The plan went smoothly -- until we got to Birmingham. Despite admonitions from all sides of the family for my grandmother to stop working and let everyone else take over, she tried to put the pecan pie on a counter that was out of her reach and ended up falling and shattering her shoulder.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my grandmother. I love laying in bed with her and holding her soft wrinkled hands while she tells me stories about how mischievous my dad was when he was younger. I love her home-grown wisdom and toughness. But she is shaped like a bowling ball: 5 feet even and round. We’ve been telling her for years that she needs to sit down and let us do the holiday work, but she’s stubborn and tough AND a Nichols, all of which make it difficult to tell her what to do. So we spent a few hours in the emergency room tending to her on Christmas Day. And then the second accident happened.

After my grandma’s crisis was over, my Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Charlie packed up to leave. While Charlie was trying to turn off the emergency break, he accidentally popped the hood. When he got out to put the hood back in place, he forgot to switch the car to park. The car rolled back, not only over his foot, but the open door pushed him down. He was quite scraped and bruised before the ordeal was over.

But hey, everybody lived; we intermittently ate good food, and we had some great fellowship. I hope everyone else had a wonderful and injury-free Christmas.