The Storm That (Nearly) Stole Christmas

I was determined to bring my splintered family together for the best-ever holiday. Nature had other ideas.

- Cathrin Bradbury

THE WEATHER NETWORK will tell you that the Great Ice Storm of 2013 was caused by a Texas warm front colliding with an Ontario cold mass. But I'm pretty sure the superstorm system that left a million people in the U.S. and Canada without power and cost $200 million to clean up was brought on by my fury that my husband and children refused to embrace the joy of Christmas. My Toronto neighbourhood was a crime scene of snapped trees, fallen hydro poles and tangled wires. But the most important thing to me about the big freeze of 2013 was that my fuming, fractured family Christmas was stopped dead in its not-so-merry reindeer tracks.

My husband and I had separated in 2009, after 25 years of a marriage that produced two loved children and many happy Christmases. In the four years since he'd moved out, we'd made separate lives, with one exception. Each December 24, I continued to hang the stockings by the chimney with care, yes, but also with a stubborn insistence that my husband join us to follow the same holiday rituals we always had, married or not.

If we could recreate Christmas of old, as if nothing had changed-all I had to do was stick to the script from our happy years—I would eventually locate the joy that had eluded our family for some time. I did this for the kids (by now young adults), I told myself, to prove that even after divorce, we were still the same family and not some faux version of it. This belief was as false as it was well-intentioned.