As a rule, I'm not a big fan of "obligatory" holidays. You know the ones: those in which you are expected to buy gifts. (These commercialized holidays just seem wrong to me for some reason.) While they can certainly be enjoyable if you have both time and money, if you are lacking in either of these areas it can easily become more of a stressful chore as opposed to a Most Wonderful Time of the Year. (For me, I'd be much happier not doing any gift exchange, and simply enjoy the season itself: the food, the lights, the music, and friends/family. But I digress.)
Today's story is about one particular Christmas Eve in which I had very little money, and most of the family (except my dad and I) were out-of-town. I was over at his house after we both had gotten off of work, watching the Sci-Fi channel as was the tradition, when we decided to do something spontaneous.
We pooled our resources. Between us, we had about $37. After some quick calculation, we determined that was more than enough to do a Christmas Eve, middle-of-the-night road trip to Gatlinburg, TN.
Every winter, Gatlinburg and the surrounding areas go all-out on holiday decorating. We had always talked about going, but it was usually difficult to coordinate. Not to mention, potentially expensive. Since this particular year would just be the two of us (building castles in the sky), and we wouldn't be able to do anything else anyway, we thought it would be a hoot to ride up there, cruise around a bit, maybe watch the sunrise over the mountains, and ride back. We couldn't afford a room and they would probably be all booked anyway. But we had enough for some gas! ROAD TRIP!
So, we raided the kitchen for any snacks. I brought my camera, two music CDs (the old radio didn't pick up any stations), and a few pillows and blankets. We got into the rusty old Ford pickup, put the Brian Setzer Orchestra CD into the player to get us jump jivin' and wailin' (mostly wailin'), and began our memorable journey.
Roughly four fun hours of highway, stories, and some NSFW jokes later, we pull in to Pigeon Forge, the first big tourist trap before one gets to Gatlinburg. There are NO cars to be seen on the road. (Bear in mind, though, that it is nearly midnight so businesses are closed and most folks would be snoring away waiting for 'ole Saint Nick to perform a home invasion in the name of delivering materialistic, pointless crap to overly spoiled children. Sorry, sorry. I really do like this holiday, I promise. Remember the pretty lights?)
Oh, it should be mentioned, there are NO lights on. There are certainty some gigantic fixtures with bulbs on them, and they are EVERYWHERE, but they are turned OFF.
Well...shit.
But hey, we are still having a wonderful time riding around instead of sitting in an empty house watching a Twilight Zone marathon, and the unlit fixtures are still pretty impressive ("I bet that really looks awesome when it is all lit up"), so hey, all-in-all it's a net win. Plus, seeing Gatlinburg with ZERO traffic is a lottery-win rarity in and of itself.
Naturally, we want to drive up into the mountains, so we turn off of the main road and head up, and up, and up… c'mon, old truck, you can make it!
The old truck made it. We found an overlook where you could see the entire town miles below, a glittering jewel in the valley even with most of the Christmas lights switched off, and grabbing our blankets and pillows we dozed off for a few hours, silently hoping the cops wouldn't catch two grown men snoring away on Christmas Morning in a beat-up old Ford truck on the side of the road in an isolated spot in the mountains. You can imagine how that awkward conversation might go, but I strongly prefer you didn't.
We awoke to one of the best sights ever recorded in my memory. Sunrise over the mountains is a breathtaking event all by itself, but we had an added bonus: it had snowed all around us. It was merely a light dusting, but more than enough to be magical. A White Christmas! (If you dream about that sort of thing.) The snow was only around the area where we were, too; it had not fallen down in the town itself. Take that, town! In your face! (Or not, because it's in OUR faces. Heyoo!)
Ahem.
After grabbing some convenience store breakfast consisting of Pecan Swirls, Doritos, and Mountain Dew (Get it? Mountains?), we drove around a little in Knoxville since that was something else we rarely had a chance to do. Eventually we headed back home, where the rest of my memory fades into obscurity.
But that doesn't matter. The road trip on that night of Christmas Eve, which cost only about $37 in gas, is to this day my favorite Christmas memory.
Also, I still have yet to see those damn lights actually turned on. I bet they look pretty awesome when they are all lit up.
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