Above: Elliot licks a lollypop (or “sucker” if you’re from the Midwest) that his uncle Andrew gave him.

We’ve been traveling to celebrate Christmas. If you were an alien from another planet observing our family, you would assume that driving long distances is part of our Christmas religious observance. I guess it could be, since the wiseman traveled some distance to do their religious observance. Mary and Joseph were caught traveling at the first Christmas. But since you’re from our home planet, you realize traveling is anything but a sanctified ritual. It’s a messy trial. Then again, I guess trials can be sanctifying so maybe the most miserable way to travel is the most spiritual way to travel.

This year we were spending Christmas with my parents, or as Elliot calls them, “Fwamma and Fwampa.”

This meant we had to drive to Pennsylvania. We observed our Christmas traveling trial a day early because the forecasters were predicting the “Storm of the Century” on the same day we were planning on driving to Pennsylvania. I didn’t want to get caught on the Turnpike in a blizzard. Admittedly that would’ve been a huge trial, and thus a huge spiritual experience, but I felt like my family was quite spiritually fulfilled – for now at least. We still have to travel home yet, after all.

Of course, traveling is getting easier with each generation, thus losing its ability to shape our character. Maybe this is why our nation is in a moral decline. Our forefathers traveled by oxen teams and covered wagons that looked like porcupines from all the arrows sticking out of them. Then we starting using Model Ts on the same muddy paths as the oxen. Then we built paved highways and kicked the oxen off of them (unless you live in Amish country). Then cars started improving. Speed limits were raised.

When I was a kid, my parents had a 1974 Ford E-100 van. It was built after the Model T but before cars starting improving much. It had a 200 cubic inch, six cylinder engine, a three speed transmission, and four inches of play in the steering wheel. You could perform an Irish jig on the steering wheel and the van would never change direction.

We would often drive the van to my grandpa’s land in West Virginia during the summer to go camping. It took about six hours to get there and I remember being very bored in the back of the van – so bored that I played with pretzels. I found that if a placed a pretzel between my thumb and index finger and squeezed it, I could shoot pieces of pretzel across the van in somewhat of predictable trajectory. This was my first experience with controlled projectiles. Later I would move on to slingshots, BB guns, potato guns, model rockets, standard firearms, and even, on the unfortunate occasion, vomit.

In comparison, my children travel like royalty. Our van is climate controlled and downright comfortable – Unless you’re lying under it fixing something during a historic cold snap, like I was doing these past few days. Ironically, the very children who needed their character built were inside playing with Grandma and eating cookies in front of a glowing coal stove, instead of removing stripped exhaust studs like they should’ve been. That job fell to me, if we didn’t want to walk home. We’re spiritual, but not that spiritual.

The problem with the van was that several months ago some inept mechanic stripped the threads in the oil pan where the oil plug goes. If you’re an inept mechanic, let me explain.

The oil plug is the thing that holds all the oil from pouring out of the bottom of your engine. When you change oil, you remove this plug, let the old oil drain, and screw it back in again. It’s not a hard process to master, which is why I told Janice the oil change would only take about half an hour or so.

“It’s just an oil change. It won’t take long,” I said.

You can imagine my shock and horror then, when I witnessed an inept mechanic tighten my oil plug until it went limp, kind of like toddler who has been asked to pick up toys but instead melts into a useless puddle on the floor. You see, the oil plug is made from steel, which is a hard metal, and the oil pan on the engine (where the plug screws into) is made from aluminum, a very soft metal. When the two arm wrestle, the softer material loses. This means there are no threads for the plug to screw into and it never gets tight. The oil plug just keeps going in circles like a hamster wheel, symbolizing the futility of the mechanic’s existence, at least at that moment. I began telling the inept mechanic exactly how I felt.

“Who are you yelling at?” Janice asked. “And are you done yet?”

I sighed. “I’m yelling at myself. It’s called self soothing. And no, I’m not quite done yet.”

“Can you self sooth quietly? The children might hear you.”

Eventually I found a somewhat temporary solution but it always dripped a little in the driveway and all over the bottom of the van. I figured it just gave the van extra rust protection.

Inevitably, right before we left for Pennsylvania, the van was due for an oil change. We were in the middle of packing to leave.

“How long will it take?” Janice asked.

“It’s just an oil change. Maybe half an hour?” I answered. “It won’t take long.”

A long time after that I was still fiddling with an oil plug that was worse than ever. It wouldn’t get tight and I didn’t have time to fix it right, even with the most optimistic timelines I could muster. After some tense negotiations, I convinced the oil plug to leak slowly, instead of quickly, which I considered a victory and quickly stopped before I was tempted to fix it better.

I sauntered into the kitchen where Janice was waging her own war. Flour bomb craters were scattered around the kitchen and weapons of war were strewn around the battlefields. Janice was beating raw cooking ingredients into the shape of cookies and was winning, though the attitude in the room was a bit tense. In preparation for Christmas she made eight loaves of sourdough bread, three dozen peanut blossom cookies, eight dozen chocolate chip cookies, five dozen chocolate crinkle cookies, six dozen monster cookies, two batches of cinnamon rolls, a pan of homemade granola bars, and ten dozen sugar cookies. But at this point in time she was only halfway through her cooking campaign.

I snatched a cookie from the cooling rack and asked between the morsels in my mouth, “Goodness, why don’t you calm down. We’re pretty much ready to go, not?”

Janice’s veins on the sides of her forehead bulged in such a way that I could see her thoughts pulsating through them. Her left eye twitched in a manner that resembled morse code, which wasn’t really useful because I don’t know morse code.

“ALMOST READY!? Oliver needs a nap, Adi needs to do school work, you STILL need to pack your clothing, we need to clean the van AND the living room, wrap the presents for your family, AND I thought you said you’d be done with that van THREE HOURS ago! And I have forty dozen more cookies to make! AND…” she took a breath and resumed, her words rushing from her mouth like steam whistling from a tea kettle. I frantically tried to remember at least one thing she said and hurried away to do it, portraying a fine example of servant leadership.

I forgot an important rule. Never, ever provoke a woman who is getting ready for a big event, such as a holiday or a vacation or a wedding. They are usually tap dancing on the knife edge of sanity. If they get the slightest sense that you aren’t panicking along with them, they’ll wrap their arms around you and purposely drag both of you into the pit of crazy. I guess it’s only fair. Men don’t panic as quickly because we forget half the things we should be panicking about. It’s good to have women around to remind us.

I checked the oil again before we left and we had a non-eventful trip to Pennsylvania. It was still dripping but at a manageable rate. A big game tracker could probably follow us to my parents house just by tracking the oil spots on the Turnpike. The next day there would be a fifty car pile up on the Ohio Turnpike with two fatalities although it was from snow and ice, not mysterious oil slicks. Praise God we traveled a day early!

Once we arrived at my parent’s house I began complaining to my dad about my leaking van and described all the ways I was plotting to fix it, each way more cunning and complex than the last.

“Why don’t you just put a new oil pan on it?” He asked.

“I just assumed they cost a lot.” I said. A quick eBay search revealed they didn’t cost much. A quick YouTube video showed me they weren’t that hard to replace, proving that video editing can change your perception of reality. I’m pretty sure YouTube mechanics edit out several days of cursing and driving around looking for parts, leading you to believe that if a beer chugging, pot bellied redneck armed with cinder blocks, an impact driver, and a loose grasp of their own IQ can do the project in half an hour, you can can too. In that way, YouTube tutorials are like sin. They tempt you to start projects that take you further than you wanted to go and keep you longer than you wanted to stay.

Still, I knew the stupid plug had to be fixed and what better time then now, when we had back-to-back vacation days filled with free babysitters? I asked Janice if she wanted to go anywhere the next day.

“Why?” she asked, suspiciously.

“I’m going to be working on the van so it might be out of commission for half a day or so.”

“Sure, as long as it doesn’t take longer than that.”

“Pssh. It’s just taking out a couple bolts and swapping parts. It won’t take long.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

We drove to the local Advance Auto and wouldn’t you know it, they had my oil pan in stock! We drove back, confident that procuring a hard-to-find part so easily was a sign of providential blessing. I started removing an exhaust section so I could reach my oil pan. A day later, as I wrestled on the new oil pan, which, as it turns out, wasn’t exactly a perfect fit, a historic cold snap hit the area and the temperature plummeted to 4 degrees. It felt like I was performing a colonoscopy on an icicle. A day later the stubborn weather continued as several stripped exhaust studs squealed and groaned and reluctantly came out, but only after they were tortured and threatened and even embarrassed by shameless pleading and begging. Even after they were out I could hear them making rude remarks from the trash can.

Still, I only underestimated the time required to do a simple task by 250%. I’m getting better!

Other missionaries told me that when I’m on the field, try not to mention I’m a mechanic because then I’ll have a parade of people wanting me to fix things, whether I know how or not. Instead, I’m going to tell people to schedule the repair with Janice. She’ll double over laughing and say, “Can you do without it for six months? Because it’ll take longer than that.” Then she’ll walk away in hysterics because, as she often says, “If you don’t laugh about it, you’ll cry.”

But the van is now fixed. Well, at least that problem is fixed. There’s a few others but they can wait. There is something I call a “mechanic’s high” when you fix something properly and have a minimum amount of hardware left over. It feels good. It feels manly. It gives you the confidence you need to embark on another project and get yourself way in over your head yet again.

With the van fixed, we could settle down and enjoy Christmas. We had an overwhelming amount of food for Christmas dinner. I think Mom was trying to bribe us so we stick around until next Christmas. We opened presents, sat around in front of the coal stove, played a few games, and argued over politics until Mom told us to stop. Dad told jokes until Mom told him to stop. I ate food until my body told me to stop.

I hope your Christmas was as good as mine.