When a Marine in the family gets orders to deploy, the calendar stops being a schedule and starts being a list of things you’re going to miss. One family, as recounted in an essay published by The Daily Wire, decided not to accept that math.
Writing for The Daily Wire’s Upstream section, the Marine’s sister describes how her younger brother Andrew — a 6’5″ Marine who had spent more than a year stationed at Quantico, about 45 minutes from her house, spending weekends with her husband and children — was preparing for his first deployment, an absence the family expected to last around 13 months.
He had become a fixture at home: free haircuts, home-cooked meals, weekends with his godson. He also, per his sister’s account, caught hand, foot, and mouth disease from the kids, which she notes probably squares the ledger.
Saying goodbye to him at his new base across the country was hard. The holidays ahead, without him, looked harder. Then her husband floated an idea: what if they just did all of them at once?
A plan built in one evening, executed in one Saturday
Together with their parents, the sister planned what the family called Holiday Day — a single Saturday during Andrew’s pre-deployment leave dedicated to New Year’s Day, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, Independence Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. According to the account, it turned out to be more wonderful, and more dangerous, than she had anticipated.
It began as a surprise around 9 a.m. at the parents’ house. A handful of relatives followed Andrew to the bathroom after he woke up, waited for the door to open, and hit him with noisemakers and a chorus of “Happy New Year!” He broke into what his sister describes as an embarrassed, lopsided smile and asked if they were doing all the holidays. They were.
Mimosas followed — orange juice optional — along with 2027 glasses and enough noisemakers that the four-year-old had his confiscated. The Valentine’s course arrived as a breakfast cake decorated with Trader Joe’s candy hearts. The playlist, her sister admits, was a weak point: “Auld Lang Syne” gave way to a Spotify search for Valentine’s music that never quite produced a crowd-pleaser for mixed company.
Easter came next. While the men distracted Andrew, the sister, her mother, and her sister-in-law scattered plastic eggs around the neighborhood pool — off-season stock ordered from Amazon, filled with malted milk robin eggs. A step stool extended the hiding spots. Deer wandered past while they worked, which the sister took as a good omen. The hunt itself mostly consisted of her four-year-old grabbing eggs and dropping them, but she counts it a success.
Green beads, a smoked turkey, and 13 neighbors
One of her favorite stretches was St. Patrick’s Day lunch at a local Irish restaurant, where 11 of them crowded a long table for Scotch eggs, corned beef, and Guinness. The group split the G — drinking to the middle of the letter on the glass — and the sister believes she came closest, though she concedes the glasses had been washed so many times that some of the lettering was gone. “At least we knew they were clean,” she writes. A sign on the wall read, “Countdown to St. Paddy’s Day: 187 days.” For them, it was zero.
Halloween was where the day turned emotional. The mother had emailed the neighborhood asking whether anyone wanted to participate in trick-or-treating, offering to supply the candy if residents would simply be home around 4 p.m. to hand it out. Thirteen households in the neighborhood where the siblings grew up said yes, and some offered their own candy. Houses came decorated with pumpkins, American flags, and in one case an inflatable dragon. One family handed out crayons. One father ran out of his house not with candy but with a card for Andrew. Another parent invited the costumed, sweating group to raid her garage fridge for drinks.
Andrew, for the record, went as a reindeer. The costumes were mostly assembled through last-minute Amazon purchases, but Thanksgiving was a different problem. Finding a whole turkey outside of pilgrim-and-pumpkin season is not easy, and the parents had searched. The break came when friends showed off an ice chest stocked by a local farm — including two turkeys. After hearing what it was for, the friends offered to smoke a turkey themselves and drop it off Saturday evening. The sister calls it one of the best birds she’s ever had, paired with an early-season Costco pumpkin pie.
An axe, a homemade mortar rack, and one box that tipped over
Then Christmas. The parents had a mid-sized evergreen growing too close to their fence, so after dinner the father handed Andrew an axe and, barefoot and shirtless, he took it down. It fell with a gentle whoosh, was propped in a borrowed stand, and strung with a mismatched set of lights. The family watched “It’s A Wonderful Life” on the porch until 9 p.m., the appointed hour for the arrival of the friend who would run the final event.
That event was Independence Day, saved for last. Fireworks are easy to buy in the South well into the fall, and a family friend offered to shoot them off using a homemade mortar rack. The show in the street was big, loud, and bright — and, per the sister, arcing alarmingly close to the pine trees overhead. The trees weren’t the problem. A box firework tipped onto its side, sending bursts down the road, through the gap between neighbors’ houses, and directly at her other younger brother, who was filming. She and her sister-in-law watched in disbelief until the sister-in-law started running for the house; the sister followed. Andrew, she writes, casually sauntered toward the box, which righted itself and finished the show.
Some of the family went to bed. A few stayed up to finish the movie — her pitch of “Christmas with the Kranks” having been vetoed for something with more gravitas, a call she concedes was correct. What struck her afterward was how eagerly the community had joined in. Some neighbors had known Andrew since Little League. Others may have simply wanted to do something for a deploying service member.
The day, she writes, came together because of dozens of generous people — many of whom will also be praying for him once he’s gone.
This article is based on an essay published by The Daily Wire as part of its Upstream section.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/my-marine-brother-was-about-to-miss-every-holiday-our-family-had-other-plans