COLORADO SPRINGS — With many people avoiding travel this year to keep safe from COVID-19, spending Christmas without your family may be hard. But for one couple, they’ve never let that get in their way. And they don’t want it to get in your way either.
When Michael and Hannah McNamee tied the knot a decade ago, Christmas time in their then home of snowy Laramie, Wyoming could get interesting.
“The roads would shut down,” Hannah McNamee said. “We were isolated between Rawlins and Cheyenne.”
Being snowed in, they only usually had each other each year.
“We didn’t really travel that much, and so we still wanted to have a good time over the holidays,” Michael McNamee said.
So they got to work.
“I don’t know if you’ve watched some of those old cheesy Christmas specials on TV, so I guess kind of the idea was like… what would that look like at our house,” he said.
They started holding their own, precisely blocked out, two day, “Christmas Spectacular”
“Well we start with a bang,” Michael said.
It’s complete with an opening parade.
“We have two dogs, so we’ll follow them around the house and be a little silly about that,” Hannah said.
And of course, it comes with all the Christmas traditions you could ask for.
“I always look forward to the gingerbread house making,” she said.
It even brought them some new ones.
“One that’s special to us is the craft hour,” Michael said. “When we had our first Christmas together we couldn’t afford decorations. Our friend gave us a Charlie brown christmas tree and we didn’t have a star, so we made a star together.”
They’ve kept the tradition alive, even as they’ve lived in less treacherous Colorado Springs the past five years.
“We’ve been doing this for, I think, nine years,” he said.
And this year, their Christmas spectacular is getting syndicated.
“It’s like everybody’s stuck in Wyoming in a Blizzard this year,” Michael said. “A lot of people have asked if we can share it with them.”
In a year where many of us have traded our airline tickets for Zoom accounts, take it from the McNamees, there’s always a way to make your Christmas spectacular.
“The most valuable thing you can give somebody is your time,” Michael said. “Just make the most of it. I feel like spending some time doing whatever makes you happy this season is gonna be really important this year.”
