Christmas at the Rig

I know many of you are very curious about what my Christmas looked like. Here it is!

I was very worried about how being away from my family would affect me during Christmas. For my family, Christmas is literally the only holiday we manage to gather for each year.  Breaking the tradition of spending the holidays with my family was a hard reality to face. As it turns out, the worry was worse than the reality.

Part of me was also a little excited. Honestly the commercialization of Christmas kind of angers me a little. Basically a lot of stores spend so much time telling you that unless you’re buying _____ for your _____ then you don’t really love them. This season should be about selfless, abounding, conditionless love. The love that God feels for us. The love that God calls us to show towards one another. Part of me was excited to see what Christmas is like without presents. Without fancy food. Without stuff. 

Here’s how I spent Christmas.

We had a weird tool failure at around 4 am on the 23^rd and I was on shift after getting 3 hours of sleep that night. (Oh and the night before too. I was exhausted.)  We stayed up working to fix it until giving up at noon. I slept and then woke up again after 6pm.  I was on shift again until I gave up at 9 am Christmas Eve morning. I slept for part of the day, and then woke up at around 6 pm.  The new tools we ordered had arrived and so we began to assemble them.

At around 9:30 pm we stopped to have dinner with the crew. They set up tables and served tamales and turkey and fried shrimp and some other stuff I didn’t have room to eat. We sat and ate and listened to the air brake as they continued to drill. We finished dinner, took a few pictures, and then went back to assembling our tool. We finished programming the tool at around 2 am. Then I stayed up a little longer to try our failing tool again. I ended up going to bed around 5 am. Merry Christmas!

Christmas morning, I woke up around 10 pm. I did some work. Reports, updates, etc. I talked to my family. We went to the beach and watched the sun go down. I feel asleep on the couch in the trailer until my coworker woke me up for the final test of the tool at around 2 am.

So there you go. Nothing too exciting! A nice dinner Christmas Eve and then a day of work! Did I miss my family? Of course. Was it the hardest day I’ve had? No, certainly not. I’ve had much harder days and, I am sure, will have harder ones in the future. Was it what I expected? Just about. I was expecting to be working more actually. The respite was nice. A chance to sit and read again the story of Christmas and reflect on why and what we are celebrating. The chance to go the beach and be outside and not wear coveralls. And the chance to share Christmas with complete strangers in a very different world, something not everyone can say they’ve experienced.