My family was scurrying around, rummaging through dressers and closets trying to find belts/ties/shoes that matched our brown/black/navy socks/pants/skirts. Mom and I were sequestered in separate bathrooms, singeing our foreheads with curling irons. Dad was bouncing his keys and pacing around the front closet. Meanwhile, the car was warming up in the garage (with the doors open, of course – we weren’t that careless). My mom even made sure to turn off the tree lights so the aging angel tree-topper’s lacy gown wouldn’t self-combust. Yep, it was Christmas Eve.

While we were at mass (bunching into pews with other perfumed and rushed-looking churchgoers) carbon monoxide lingered in the now-closed garage. It was leaching into the house through tiny gaps in insulation. We left the car running for something like eight minutes, but that was enough time to fill an open garage with carbon monoxide.

Piercing bleeps greeted us at the door instead of carolers, but we didn’t dial 911 or stand out in the snow and take “deep gulps of fresh air” like they advise on PSAs. We did, however, call Xcel Energy and a man named Eric came out and probed every nook and cranny with a Ghostbusters-like device for the gas. My parents were chatty and sympathetic since he was working on Christmas Eve; we even offered him chili, which sat on the stove as part of our Christmas Eve tradition. He didn’t accept any, nor did he detect any dangerous levels of gas. It was either a sensitive detector or the levels had already subsided. He simply chided us for running the car in the garage (even with the door open) and was on his way.

Twice. The entire sequence described above happened twice.

The next Christmas (or maybe there was a year in between), we warmed up the car for (what we thought was) a negligible amount of time, drove to church, heard the bleeps, and the same employee checked our house. Again. On Christmas Eve.

But the years are so blurry now it may as well have happened five times. The whole concept has inflated and morphed: I could’ve sworn he stood in the kitchen with us and politely ate chili as we poured our Mogen David (for my parents) and Kristian Regale pear sparkler (for my brother and me) and looked on as we posed for our timed photo. Or maybe he held the camera, directing us to line up in front of the Nativity scene or squeeze in closer in the frame.

In my mind, Eric was a weary traveler, and our home was a place of refuge and camaraderie … even though our house’s safety was in question and he was probably on his last call of the night, ready to go home to his own family. (In my defense, there’s way too much allegory surrounding the Christmas season, and the wistful writer-in-me was swept up into it). Maybe his presence was so memorable because he was the only person outside my family who’s been with us on Christmas Eve. He “joined” us at one of our closest familial times, when the anticipation burns off and the holidays actually happen.

Some traditions can’t be explained. In this case, an accident became a “tradition” that I almost wish could continue. (In fact, it did continue – through storytelling and jokes. “Let’s call up Eric!” we’d say, years later.) Scratch that – most traditions can’t be explained: we continue to watch the cartoons we’re so sick of we could quote them in our sleep, we take the annual photo even though it means keeping our dress clothes on for five more minutes, and my mom drinks the hardly-palatable Christmas wine because the nostalgia is stronger than the taste.