Nineteen hours in a truck. Stuck in two feet of thick snow. Not much food. No bathroom. No kleenex to blow nose.  Phone’s dead. And freezing.

Dec. 22

My family of five head to Amarillo, in our truck, to see family for Christmas.

Dec. 23

That night we feast on ham, buttered mashed potatoes and homemade pecan pie. We all gather and open gifts together. I unwrapped a knitted scarf made by my Memaw. We ended the night with a game of ‘In a Pickle.’

Dec. 24 – Christmas Eve

We wake up and say our good-byes. My Memaw makes six ham sandwiches for the road.

9:30am

We meet my stepsister and her husband at Starbucks in Amarillo.

It’s snowing as we begin our normal four-and-a-half hour drive home. The weather channel said the snow will stop about an hour outside of Amarillo, so we figure it should let up. Wrong. It got worse. Hour after hour after hour. Snow and ice everywhere.

We drive and see a car stuck in a ditch. My stepdad pulls off the road and ask them if they want to be pulled out. They said ‘A tow truck was on the way.’ My stepdad said ‘It’s Christmas eve: let me save you a few dollars.’ He grabs the tow rope behind the back seat and pulls them out. They thank him and we continue our way.

As we keep traveling, at about 5mph now, we pull more cars out, and then come to a complete stop.

1:30pm

We should be home by now, but we haven’t moved in a while. We were getting hungry and we had six sandwiches to feed seven people and two dogs.

As we begin to move slowly, the highway is a solid rock of ice.

Before reaching Wichita Falls they were closing down the highway. Cars start taking the risk and pull off into side roads. But, with snow to my knees, no one could tell the difference between a road and a ditch until they get stuck.

We finally take the chance and we end up on a back road.

We started down the road, still at a slow pace. We stop a few more times to help pull more cars out of the ditches, then once again came to a complete stop.

5:30pm

Still on the back road, not moving, we meet some very nice travelers as we work as a team to pull out vehicles in ditches. Until, we came across one SUV. As we start to pull them out, they turn their wheel the wrong way and get us stuck.

We couldn’t do anything because no one could pull us out.

7:30pm

Two trucks make their way up to us and both work together to try and get us out. With the two big trucks and about 40 people pushing in the freezing cold, we eventually get out.

12:00am

We get to Wichita Falls and drop off a Schwan’s man. We gave him a ride since his truck was pushed into a ditch because it wouldn’t make it up the hill.

Then my stepsister’s car got stuck. That took a while to dig out but again we got it. By that time my stepdad had probably pulled out 20 cars.

On our way home there are empty vehicles lined up and down the highway. It ends up that security came and took all the families to a shelter for the night.

My stepdad was determined to get us home because of my brother, Brandon.

He began to cry when we were stuck and said, “I don’t think Santa is coming.”

It broke our heart to see a six-year-old cry because he didn’t think Santa was coming. That makes my stepdad do whatever it takes to get us home by Christmas.

4:00am- Christmas morning

We are driving through Boyd and about to arrive at Decatur. Everyone that we called told us it snowed like crazy in Decatur. We couldn’t believe what they thought was a lot of snow compared to what we had been through. It looked like nothing happened compared to the snow I was in all day.

4:30am

We arrive in our drive way. Go inside. And go to sleep.

8:30am

We wake up to open gifts.

I will never forget the Christmas when I was stuck in a truck for 19 hours, had very little food, no bathroom and a little space to bond with my family. Wow, what a Christma