My favorite Christmas Eve? The year we got snowed in!

Look: A Christmas gift from sunny Arizona!

My favorite Christmas started out as one of the worst, because we had been snowed in for days without power, thinking for sure we would be spending the holiday in a freezing house without a hot meal.

But that Christmas Eve when my husband walked home from work though eight miles of snow — yes, with hills in both directions! — to find the house full of warmth, lights and even a chicken roasting in the oven, he said “it truly felt like a Christmas miracle.”

That was cool. But even cooler was how I got to the store to buy that chicken, then got it home — where the power came on just in time for me to cook it.

It was 2008, the year we left Seattle for the “countryside” of Kitsap County. We didn’t want to leave the city, but did want to save up money for our wedding, so we decided to rent a small granny unit from someone we knew on Bainbridge Island for the next year.

Which is how us certified “city folk” — who moved to Washington from California completely unprepared for the cold — came to be living on a private rural road while completely unprepared to either drive in the snow or live without electricity. 

Because while Seattle had taught us to put on plenty of fleece and long underwear before heading outside, it only snowed there enough to convince me to put a couple of cinder blocks in the back of our pick-up to keep it from fish-tailing — certainly not enough to inspire us to get a vehicle that could drive through more than a dusting of snow. 

And we learned even less about preparing for power outages in Seattle, as our lights had barely flickered once in eight years. But on Bainbridge Island, our power seemed to go out with every breeze, and it snowed there, no joke, the day we moved — in April! But those flakes were spring “sprinkles,” both easily managed and forgotten by the time winter arrived.

And boy, did it! On Dec. 21, the first official day of winter, all of the Puget Sound Region was covered in several inches of snow, the most that Seattle had gotten in a decade. And the snowstorm was then followed by days of well-below-freezing temperatures that kept the thick blanket of of frozen water firmly in place.

Since the first day of the snow was a Sunday, it was actually pretty magical, and we marveled at the lovely sight of the world outside covered in white. Even hiking about a quarter of a mile in the snow to get our mail was kinda fun — the first time.

My husband heading to work with our truck still snowed in.

 

But when the snow hadn’t budged by the time we had to figure out how to get to work with our truck still completely snowed in, all the fun and magic was wrung out of our Winter Wonderland.

 

And though our jobs were on opposite sides of the Puget Sound, we both started our journeys to work by walking three miles to the ferry building and taking a 35-minute boat ride to Seattle. Then as my husband walked another mile to his work near the baseball and football stadiums, I waited for the next ferry that could take me right back across the water to Bremerton, a 55-minute sailing. From there I had to take a foot ferry to Port Orchard, another 15-minute sailing, all to get a town that literally felt like a stone’s toss away from where I had started more than four hours earlier.*

 

So luckily after we put out the newspaper that day, my co-worker Denise saved me from making another four-hour ferry trek that night by offering me a bed in her home. Then she and her husband Raul drove me to the grocery store that night to buy food for a holiday meal I still hoped to have, though I had no way to cook it yet.

I remember feeling so grateful as we drove to the store, their truck and its driver moving us safely down streets that my truck and me slid down as helplessly as I had slid down even the slightest incline the first — and last — time I tried to ski. And I felt even more grateful walking down the aisles of the store, marveling at all the technology like lights and refrigeration that I usually took for granted.

And the next morning I was grateful for yet another prepared person, my boss Rich. Who, when I asked for a ride to the foot ferry, offered instead to save me another long ferry mission by driving me all the way home, as his GMC Suburban could easily handle the snowy highway. In fact, it even drove us all the way up the still snow-covered road to my house that our poor little truck, still stuck in our driveway, had no hope of climbing. 

Though the power was still out when I got home, I started preparing dinner in the hopes that our electricity would be restored on Christmas Eve. And, about an hour before my husband arrived, it was, allowing me to finally put the chicken in the oven and make us that hot holiday meal we craved.

That was very cool.

But coolest of all was how that first Christmas in Kitsap County made me feel part of a village — a village that drove me to the store, gave me a place to stay, then drove me home. And, yes, a village I had never found while living in the city.

*Before the highways crossed Kitsap County, there was a wonderful system of small ferry boats shuttling people back and forth from all of the dozen or so towns on the peninsula. But in 2008, even though you could easily swim from the tip of Bainbridge to my newspaper’s office in Port Orchard, unless I had my own boat, I could not take one from Bainbridge to my work.