christmas miracles (heart-warming stories from that yule-tide time)

one christmas as a young girl i walked into my parents' shoe closet to behold a large, milky-white plastic play kitchen - complete with stove, overhead microwave, fold-out bar and mini-refrigerator. For the next two weeks, i was drunk with the possibilities of the gift that i, the older and more culinarily experienced sibling was about to receive.
when christmas morning came, i saw my kitchen-shaped present next to the tree - glowing at me in recognition. as i stepped over all the other, lesser presents toward my glorious gift, wrapped in paper plaid print, something terrible stopped me mid-climb. A scrawl of words glared at me from the scotch-taped Christmas tag:

to: Mariah; from: Mrs. Cooking Claus!

I watched in a daze of dissapointment while my parents helped her tear the paper away from the miniature manufactured homemaker’s dream. She stepped away from her present, her mouth already chapped and covered with christmas chocolate, and exclaimed,
“what is it?!”

And, so, that year, it was a christmas miracle i didn't kill her.

- katherine valentine

i used to get up in the middle of the night when i was real little and use a blade to peel the scotch tape from the wrapping paper so i could open my gifts and see what they were, then rewrap them with fresh tape.... that's not really a miracle i guess, but that's how i did it.

- jason irvine

Two years ago I returned home from my mom's house on Christmas day to find that my house had been robbed and all my stuff was gone. I was a wreck, and I had to leave in two days to go out of town for a little over two weeks. I got the cops over there, filled out a report, etc. Then flew out west two days later.

I went to Phoenix first off to visit my cousin. We hung around there for a couple of days and then we went up north to see the grand canyon. While we were sneaking into the park we came across a forest fire on the side of the road outside Tusayan, AZ. It was small, but it was creeping along the ground headed for a group of dead trees. We got out of the truck and got to work putting out the fire. We didn't get it all the way out, but we pushed it back away from the trees enough that they didn't go up. I got my cousin's GPS and called 911 to give them lat. and long. coordinates so they could locate us and send a fire truck. By the time they showed up the fire was just politely burning in the middle of a large black patch of former shrubs and pine needles. The fire crew sprayed some foam on the remnant of the fire and thanked us for our work. We never got caught sneaking into the park. Maybe the miracle is that he and I were fated, Owen Meany style, to save the state of Arizona from a fiery death on a cold January morning. If I had let the robbery bother me too much I'd have canceled my trip and that would have meant an empty gravel road in Arizona and a forest fire that was allowed to grow up.

True story (even if it's a bit grandiose).

- nick o'brien

when i was younger and still visited my father i made it clear that i needed a pony. seriously, i needed a real pony. probably the coolest thing my dad ever did was buy me a 5 foot purple horse with a feathering white mane. I loved that thing and 10 minutes later set it aflame with a radiator heater. smelled like complete shit. moral of story: most things i really want end up smelling like shit. hah.

- mickie winters

do you have any christmas miracle stories you'd like to share? send an email to learntoletgo@gmail.com with the subject "christmas miracle," and you, too, could share your story with all the attentive/badgering readers involved in the interweb!