Chattanooga Christmas Chaos

When culture talks about Christmas with family, the typical image is the kind that Taylor Swift describes. Nostalgic. Peaceful. Magical.

I had one year that was the opposite. It wasn’t peace amid the chaos. It was just the chaos.

Here’s the context: I married a gal who is from Chattanooga, Tennessee. When we got married, I moved her to Arkansas for my work. I said, “Anytime you want to go home for the holidays, we’ll make it work.” So almost every year, we’d load up the kids in the tan, then green, then red Suburban, fill the cartop carrier with presents, and make the twelve-hour drive east.

In this particular year, it was Karen, me, and our two preschool-aged daughters (my son wasn’t born yet). You can imagine the chaos of getting out the door, trying to wrap up work to leave town, getting the house ready to be away, and the drive itself—“Are we there yet?,” “I need to go to the bathroom!,” crying, and the car growing messier by the mile.

We loaded up the night before and left at around 5:00 a.m. on December 23 so we could make it by dinnertime. We did. We got out, hugged Karen’s mom and dad, let the girls run in, and started unpacking.

Then it hit.

Karen looked at me, terrified, and said, “We left all the Santa presents at home in Arkansas.”

As we reached the bottom of the hard-shell car topper, we knew it was true. Cabbage Patch Kids, roller skates, dress-up outfits—we had none of it. Santa would be skipping this Chattanooga house.

As I was the packer, it was mostly my fault.

Panic hit like a tornado. You can imagine the sinking feeling, the terse conversation between husband and wife. One question became immediately clear: “What do we do now?”

We did the only thing we could think to do. We made a list of everything we had bought and, the next morning, launched out with the swarm of last-minute shoppers. Walmart came first. We grabbed a cart and raced the aisles for replacement dolls, games, and toys on half-empty shelves. Then we headed over to Toys “R” Us and did it all over again.

Not my best moment. But maybe not my worst moment either.

In business and in life, we’ll all have moments of chaos, many of them caused by our own doing. And there are good and bad ways to handle the it.

Learn from my mistake. Here are five lessons from my Chattanooga Christmas chaos.

1. Dumb happens … even to the smartest of us. In the words of singer-songwriter Ben Rector, there are some things that are just a part of life, like Xerox developing the personal computer and then not advancing the technology. Your mistakes (hopefully) won’t be that costly, but you’re going to forget a meeting, double-book a company Christmas party and a flight home, severely underestimate a significant upcoming expense. Don’t be satisfied with mistakes, but don’t expect perfection. Having the humility to admit imperfection cultivates a healthier self-image, humanizes you to peers, and invites you deeper into relationship with God. Have the grace to extend that understanding to others, too.
2. Action is better than blame. My wife gets the credit on this one. I was the one who forgot the gifts, yet she jumped into action right along with me. There will be time later to examine the process and ask, “How did this happen?” In business, there will be time to let someone go if needed (and sometimes, that is needed immediately), but the most important thing is to get to work. No one feels better after blaming someone, but they do feel better after they’ve solved a problem.
3. It is never too late to make a good decision. I have been telling my kids that statement since they were young. Chaos doesn’t leave you without options. It simply forces you onto the tougher part of the trail, where the forks in the road are narrower and more overgrown. What decision do you need to make at this moment? Commit to making the right one.
4. Sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. I didn’t love running to Toys “R” Us on Christmas Eve and buying again what we already bought once. It felt embarrassing. It felt financially unwise. We were already exhausted, but my little girls needed their parents to come through for them. So, we did something that might have seemed reckless to an outside observer, but it was what needed to be done. In life and in business, figure out what you’ve got to do and make sure you “got ’er done.”
5. You’ll have time to fix it later. Full disclosure: When we got back to Fayetteville a week later, we returned a lot of the presents.

I wish you a Christmas full of joy and peace—one entirely free of moments like mine all those years ago. But if that’s not the Christmas you get, or if something goes sideways in 2026, there are a few things worth keeping in mind. 

Merry Christmas.