I love Christmas. What a GREAT time of year! I thought I would share my experience this year with all of you!

We spend Christmas with family in Dallas every year. Usually the weather is cold, and sometimes wet, but almost never white. In fact, in my 30 years of spending Christmas there, I do not remember a single, solid snow fall. Well, things changed this year.

We left Austin Thursday afternoon and set out for Dallas. There were small snow flurries almost the entire drive, sometimes even moderate amounts. By the time we got to Ennis, the snow had started falling quite a bit, and people on the roads were actually driving pretty calmly, which was unexpected.

Finally we got downtown, and were set to take the overpass onto 75N (Central Expressway), but someone took a small slide to the left at the top of the bridge, and decided to just stop, so we were forced onto 75S near MLK. For those that don’t know, this part of 75 is elevated for a few miles, so by the time we got through traffic, it was one huge sheet of ice. Not knowing how to drive on ice, people in the middle & right lanes would stop (horrible idea). This would cause us to stop, and thanks to the incline and bank of the highway, the car would just turn towards one of the embankments, slide to a stop, and be extremely hard to recover. It was a mess. People flipped around or turned sideway all over the place. It took us a LONG time to navigate back to surface streets, but once we did it was all good again.

I took a little video to show what it was like on the highway, and then some of the surface streets. Nothing too exciting, but I thought it was interesting since it is uncommon in Dallas. Here is the video, along with a few still images at the end:

It continued to snow through the evening on Christmas Eve, and as uncommon as it is in TX, the temp was low enough for it to not only stick, but also last through Christmas Day. This was my kid’s very first white Christmas, so of course, the first thing they did after opening presents was to go play in the snow. It was cold, so this only lasted about 10 minutes, but I got some decent shots for memories, and thought I would share a few from the batch:

Christmas night, while our son stayed his grandparents, my Wife, Daughter and I went to my Brother/Sister-in-law’s house for a few hours. As always, it was a LOT of fun, and this time I decided to pop off a few shots while we were there. My wife Sarah is in the purple’ish shirt, my sister-in-law Kristy is in green, and the only guy in the pics is my brother-in-law Craig. A great time was had by all, and I can’t wait to do it again. Here are a few of the pics from that night: