Will storm take its toll on charm?
The Daily Interlake
People want the ideal for Christmas - shining, happy children who are gleeful but never greedy about their gifts, meals that turn out to absolute perfection with a minimum of time in the kitchen, visiting relatives with whom you not only get along but who also happen to be charming, funny and well dressed.
Of course, the quintessential image of a perfect Christmas day requires a gentle dusting of lightly falling snow. But the dream overlooks the messy details that can accompany snow - wind, icy streets, impassable drifts, finding refuge at a truck stop and eating corn dogs from the under the heat lamp for Christmas dinner.
This Christmas season, the Denver area was most likely wishing it would have been careful what it wished for.
Those hoping for a postcard-perfect white Christmas instead got a paralyzing blizzard. Thousands of people were spending part of the week before Christmas stuck in their vehicles, in Red Cross shelters, in Denver International Airport, or, in my parents' case, at my sister's house on the southern end of the Denver metro area.
My parents had moved to Grand Junction, a desert-like region on the western edge of Colorado, to avoid storms such as this one forever. But then again, they were the lucky ones, getting to spend extra time with a baby grandson who has two Denver cops for parents, so the household could sleep tight without fear of a storm-related holiday gift looting.
They were in Denver to have early Christmas with my siblings and to pick up my mother-in-law from her home in a Denver suburb for the 1,000-mile drive to stay with us this Christmas.
Their plan was to head out Wednesday, but the highways were a disaster and half the state was in the process of shutting down. It seemed inevitable that they'd make it no farther than someplace like Sheridan, Wyo., where the shelter of a Holiday Inn with lousy food awaited.
We'd been in the Sheridan Holiday Inn many years ago, during a Christmas trip to Colorado when the roads were snow-covered from the Flathead Valley to Wyoming, the driving pathetically slow and treacherous.
At that time, my two boys were small enough that a holiday-season night in a bleak, cavernous, outdated hotel was redeemed by the swimming pool; I don't imagine my parents and mother-in-law would find the same joy in racing down the halls toward the pool area in bare feet and their swimming suits.
When I read the stories about what was going on in the Denver area last week - thousands of flights canceled, almost 5,000 travelers stuck in the airport, some sleeping on floors under newspapers, 350 people stranded at a Greyhound bus station downtown where 140 cots were brought in (two and a half people per cot, please) - a few days' delay of the family members' arrival (who did not have to spend days living among strangers) was not really a tragedy.
As long as they are still charming, funny and well dressed when they get here.
Reporter Heidi Gaiser may be reached at 758-4431 or by e-mail at hgaiser@dailyinterlake.com