Merry Christmas!  Happy Hanukkah!  I’m writing this on Monday from Kyle’s hometown – or, rather, home village, because Fillmore is roughly 300 people – of Fillmore, Saskatchewan.  One of the reasons I stay married to Kyle is because I sure do like visiting Fillmore, especially at Christmas.  For example, I like that everyone in Fillmore is either our relative or relative-adjacent, meaning I can wander around town in sweats drinking coffee out of my obnoxious yellow Stanley because there ain’t fooling anyone that I’m zazzier than that.  This morning, we walked over to the store to get staple groceries such as Aero chocolate bars and stayed there for a bit chatting with the owner and then walked across the street to the bakery and ordered caramel rolls for tomorrow morning, and I did the whole thing in a teal blue satin pajama top, overly-shrunken dirty yoga pants, and slide-on boots.  I didn’t even bother to bring shoes this time, just the boots, because sitting on my butt on my father-in-law’s couch doesn’t require specialty footwear.

Tomorrow night, we’ll load up on my father-in-law’s trailer – temporarily repurposed into a Christmas float – and he will pull us up and down the streets of Fillmore on a family twinkle tour.  My father-in-law has decked out his house with a smorgasbord of lights for the occasion, and one of the nicest things about the tour will be turning the corner from a hazy black field onto Main Street and seeing all of those colored lights pop out of the darkness like stars in the sky.

Speaking of small towns, darkness, and basically everything else I talked about above, we took an unexpected route to get to Canada.  Normally, we go the exact same route: Grand Forks to Devils Lake to Rugby (geographical center of North America!) to Minot and then straight up to Canada.  We’ve taken that route so many times that we have it down pat.  We know exactly where the road curves near a grove of trees if one of the boys needs to stop off and pee.  We know that when we reach the valley outside of Kenmare we have to stop what we’re doing and look for the rock numbers (every school class shapes their grad year using white rocks on the sides of the hills).  We know it so well that our 13-year-old barely needs to look up from his phone to say, “Where are we?  Oh, two hours left.”

This time, however, we were barely out of the driveway when Kyle pulled up the NDDOT website and saw that the roads around Minot were “No travel advised: ice.”

As you can probably imagine, North Dakotans have a high tolerance for winter weather.  My sister lives in North Carolina and her kids had school canceled a few weeks ago “due to weather” and she sent me a video of them sledding down a grass hill into a pile of leaves.  The next week, Grand Forks had a straight-up multi-day snowstorm and school carried on with only a two-hour delay.  If we threw up our hands every time a snowflake blew through town…well, business and industry cease to function because our hands would be too busy being thrown in the air to do anything else.  Anyways, due to our high tolerance for weather, if the NDDOT advises no travel, they mean it.

“It looks like there’s a band of clear weather east of Minot,” Kyle said.  “It shouldn’t be too bad; want to try it?”

“Sure,” I said, knowing the worst that could happen would be that we’d have to turn around.

At Towner (Cattle Capital of North Dakota!), we went north – and straight into deep, dark, dense fog.

Have you ever seen one of those Twilight Zone episodes where the protagonist runs and runs and runs through fog until they crash – literally or figuratively – into their fate?  That’s what it was like.  We were on a one-lane highway, able to only see twenty or so feet in front of the car, and surrounded by complete black.  Or, at least, what we thought was complete black.  Every few miles we’d pass green mile marker signs designating a town – towns I’d never heard of like Kramer and Maxbass, which were a surprise to me because I thought I was an expert in all things North Dakota – and we’d look out into the fog looking for a puffball of light to prove some human existed somewhere, and see nothing.

As you can imagine, we were only able to see the signs when we were basically right on top of them – which was a little problematic when we passed a very official metal road sign which read, “Bridge out, five miles, use detour.”

“Uh, there’s a bridge out,” I said to Kyle, who was looking at the map on his phone.  “Should I take the detour?”

“What detour?”  Kyle said, just as we drove past an arrow reading, “Detour.”

“I guess I’ll turn around at the bridge,” I said.

“I don’t see a bridge on the map,” Kyle said.

“Well, technically, there isn’t a bridge anymore,” I said.

By now, we were four miles past the original sign.  I slowed down.  Out of the darkness, a new sign came up: “Moose crossing, 13 miles.”

“Oh, good,” I said.

Kyle leaned forward, searching the fog for moose and broken-down bridges and Twilight Zone actors.

And then,

suddenly,

the fog lifted

And we found ourselves on the main street of a teeny-tiny town called Mohall.  Christmas lights shone in almost every window – although the businesses themselves were dark because it was pretty obvious that everyone was at a party at Double Js Bar and Grill.  We turned to listen to the music as we passed the bar.  One-hundred feet later, we were out of town and back into the fog.

“We should go back this way,” Thirteen, who had recently become very aware of Starbucks, said.  “There’s a coffee shop back there called ‘Spill the Beans.’”

“Yeah, it looks like a fun place,” Kyle said.  “Maybe we’ll come back in the summer.  And in the daytime.”

We reached the border not long past Mohall – a shout-out to the house in Sherwood which had every single vertical and horizontal surface of the exterior of its house covered in lights; it looked like a gingerbread fairyland – after which Kyle turned on his innate Canadian ESP and was able to guide us home on feel.  Fillmore has lighted tinsel decorations on the street lamps but they weren’t on for some reason (maybe because it was so late at night), making my father-in-law’s Christmas lights feel even more welcome and cheery after so much time in the dark.

“We’re here!  We’re here!”  Nine yelped from the seat.

“Not too bad,” Kyle said, as we pulled up to the garage.

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The photo above was taken during the aforementioned trailer-turned-float decoration. As you can see, I worked very hard. My brother-in-law said I was reminiscent of Napoleon with my hand in my pocket the whole time.

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I wasn’t on North Dakota Today this week because of the holiday.  Last week on North Dakota Today we talked about Nate Bertram, my Nice Person of the Week, as well as two girls hockey teams coming together to blanket the community in holiday cheer.  Remember to nominate the great people in your lives to be a Nice Person of the Week! (Valley News Live)

Fargo’s Dante Domine has inspired his fellow ROTC cadets to lend a helping shovel around the community. (Fargo Forum; Found from “Oops Only Good News”)

Like to hang up holiday cards around your house?  Shoot this article to the printer and you can have Josh Duhamel and family up on your wall. (US 1033)

Minot’s Tammy Gilmore baked up 156 dozen cookies for airmen at the Minot Air Force Base. (Minot Daily News)

Once again, gold coins have been slipped into Salvation Army kettles around Fargo. (KVRR)

Thompson’s Ali Moses is a volunteer firefighter, a North Dakota National Guard member, and the recipient of a $5,000 scholarship as she works towards a degree in commercial aviation. (Grand Forks Herald)

A Grand Forks escape room is a hotbed for marriage proposals. (Grand Forks Herald)

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