The Housekeeper Who Stole Christmas

Traveling during the holidays presents its own set of unique advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are: there are very few cars on the road if you're driving on Christmas Day; rest stops are deserted; and the employees at gas stations seem much friendlier. The disadvantages are: McDonald's is closed on Christmas; a lot of times you're driving home in a snowstorm; and there are few, if any, places to purchase toilet paper.

When you're planning your Christmas celebration away from home, mentally calculating the necessary supplies for a 5-day stay for four adults in a secluded north woods cabin that includes housekeeping services, your thoughts turn to packing plenty of festive food and beverage items such as spinach dip with water chestnuts, king crab legs, and wine in assorted colors. But do you even once stop and think to yourself, "Hmmm, I wonder if we will run out of toilet paper on Christmas morning which will cause us to have to return home a day early?"

Probably not. In fact, your thoughts will be so far from Mr. Whipple during the frantic shopping, wrapping, and baking prelude to your Christmas get-a-way that you'll be lucky to remember to grab the Christmas cookies from the freezer you spent six weeks baking.

But cookies you can do without. But four adults, I think most of us can agree, would need more than the one measly roll of toilet paper that the housekeeper left for us for our five-day Christmas celebration.

"What are they (referring to the adult children) doing with it - wrapping Christmas presents?" my husband, always the tactful one, asked when I broached the subject of an impending toilet paper shortage on Christmas Eve. Luckily, he agreed to pick some up on his way back from the nearby casino. Unluckily, (which is also how he would drive back from the casino) he forgot.

And so, Christmas morning came, with a bare cardboard tube hanging lifelessly from the toilet paper holder, and an empty tissue box lay nearby. You would have thought the Grinch himself had visited the bathroom during the night. Fortunately I have developed a healthy obsession with carrying small packets of purse-size Kleenex in every pocket of every coat I own, each compartment of my purse, and inside each zipper of my toiletries bag. I even put one in my daughter's Christmas stocking, but the tissues had pictures of moose decorated with Christmas lights on their antlers - it just didn't seem right to ask her to sacrifice them. Between my daughter, my son, my husband and me, we had exactly 44 2-ply tissues to get us through the remainder of Christmas Day. But staying another night was looking rather bleak.

Seeing the handwriting on the wall where toilet paper once hung, my son was the first to hint at perhaps calling it a holiday and heading home. My daughter suddenly remembered she had a Christmas dinner to attend, and my husband and I reluctantly acquiesced. Yes, I had to agree, Christmas is truly over once the toilet paper is gone.

But we'll be back next year, with another sack of presents, coolers full of crab legs, and a nice case of Cottonelle with Aloe.

And a truckload of coal for the housekeeper's stocking.