Christmas Day Scramble

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas!

If you didn’t celebrate Christmas, then I hope you enjoyed the day off!

If you worked at Waffle House on Christmas Day, then I hope you made a lot of money in tips and didn’t burn yourself on the grill!

This Christmas Day for me was momentous.

For one thing, it was the first Christmas I ever spent at an Airbnb in Mogadore, Ohio (sounds like some sort of Pokémon, doesn’t it?).

Secondly, it was the first Christmas that I didn’t make it to Mass in, oh, twenty years.

I’m a practicing Catholic, and Christmas Mass is important to me. So it irritates me when a parish doesn’t update its damn website to let me know that Mass is at 8 a.m. instead of 9.

When the website says “Holy Day Mass Schedule: 9 and 11”, what the fuck do you think I’m going to assume?

THAT MASS TIMES ARE 9 AND 11 ON CHRISTMAS DAY!

I still had time to find another church, though. So I boogied on to Akron and found a church that also had a 9 a.m. Mass time…according to the website.

I pulled up in a parking deck a block away and started booking it to St. Bernard’s. I was going to be eight minutes late, but I could handle that.

I got up to the door, and IT WAS LOCKED!

Well….shit!

Speaking of which, at that point I really really REALLY had to go to the bathroom, and I was banking on the church being open so I could obliterate its bathroom.

But nooooo.

Plus, at that point, I was only 15 miles from an empty gas tank.

Gaaaaaaaaah!

I couldn’t make it to Mass, I had to poop AND I was low on gas?

Come on, now!

I had no choice but to find an open gas station (on Christmas Day in Ohio? That’s a tall-ish order!) so I wouldn’t destroy Boo-Thang’s car with poo.

I couldn’t just hold out for the 11 a.m. Mass, either, because the checkout time at our Airbnb was at 11, and Boo-Thang and I still had a nine-hour car ride (best case) back to North Carolina to see my side of the family.

After I found a bathroom and got back to the Airbnb, that damn ASPCA commercial was on the TV and I just about lost it.

No Christmas Mass, iffy bowel movements, low fuel AND a commercial featuring shivering dogs?

That was a lot to take.

And it just made me want to get home sooner so I could hug Miles and Crackers.

It all would’ve been hilarious if it wasn’t for that ASPCA commercial. Although, I did find it amusing that they showed several freezing/neglected dogs and only one cat.

Because dogs>cats.

Merry Christmas, y’all!