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Last year we spent Christmas here in North Carolina, far away from our families. At the time, we had recently purchased a house and our travel budget was reallocated to conveniences like food and electricity. It was still a nice Christmas with Kate’s mom and husband Bill stopping by.

This year we decided to tell our families we’d not be joining them again. I needed to save my vacation time for Ted’s birth in 2008 and with Kate working in retail, we wouldn’t be able to make it up north for Christmas. This was what we told them. This was, as it turns out, a lie.

Just after Thanksgiving we started putting the plan together. We found an operative (Kate’s step-dad Bill) in the north who we could trust with our plans and work as our point person. We found a transport vector to get us up the coast (a cheap car rental) and our operative arranged extraction back to Rockland-Ave (they drove us home yesterday).

With logistics taken care of, we started our campaign of misinformation. Emails and phone calls were made. We told our family it would be another “Skype Christmas.” We asked them to check on the status of presents we said were shipped up north. We even used Rockland-ave.com as a way to say we are celebrating in the south.

With work arrangements taken care of and rations issued to the cats, we went dark on Saturday and hit the roads. Our point-man Bill kept in contact with us through the trip, advising us of the situation up north. After 15 hours in the squeekiest rental car ever, we were locked in on our first surprise target.

Our first victim was occasional Rockland-ave poster and semi-frequent visitor Chris, who’s door we knocked on at 12:30am on Sunday morning. She was not prepared for guests, and too sleepy to realize what was going on at first. We then had her call our operative to start the second surprising – Kate’s mom. She was dragged out of bed under false pretenses only to find her youngest daughter waiting outside her bedroom door.

Having shocked and awed most of Kate’s family on Sunday and Monday, we had to maintain radio silence if were were to surprise my family on Tuesday (Christmas day). I made a decoy blog posting, as if it were just any old weekend at Rockland-ave. I sent emails as if they were from work, and kept checking our home answering machine just in case someone decided to call.

Christmas day we hit the road early and headed to see my folks. It was pretty sweet to surprise them, Kristen and Josh, and lots of extended family.

The whole weekend was great, and felt way too short. We got lots of good eats and a car full of prizes (including the pictured Optimash Prime) and lots of good stuff for Ted. We also got to spend time with new cousin Jack, who was enjoying his first Christmas and taking the pressure of the holiday season in stride.

Here are some pics:

It was great see a plan like this come together with resulting dropped-jaws on our relative’s faces.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 12:44 am and is filed under Christmas, Clandestine, NewEngland, family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.