DAZE WORK: When your family Christmas fun dies hard

Certainly there have been a lot of Christmas stories over the years. Great ones, beginning with the first Christmas, of course. Good ones like the Peanuts Special and “It’s a Wonderful Life.” And then we have some horror stories.

The poster child for a bad Christmas has to be Bruce Willis in “Die Hard” -- only a Christmas movie at Christmas time, by the way -- as New York City Det. John McClane saving hostages from a dozen terrorists at a Christmas party at Nakatomi Plaza in Los Angeles.

Felt a bit like Willis this Christmas. You know the vision. He’s tired. He’s alone, battered and bloodied, crawling through an air duct, cigarette lighter in hand leading the way when his sarcasm rings true. “Oh, sure, come out to the coast,” he whines. “We’ll get together ... have a few laughs.”

Well, I didn’t go to the coast. I went to Jennings County where daughter Nicole lives. We had our share of laughs and a terrific Christmas that sent me home with a much-needed portable ice maker.

But as they say, getting there is half the battle. I probably should have realized a misadventure lay ahead when my car (it has 303,000 miles on it now) started making unusual noises about 30 miles outside North Vernon. As I eased into Edinburgh, it was apparent that the sound disappeared at speeds of 50 or more, easy enough to do on I-65. But when I hit State Road 31, the strange sound returned. Did I run over part of a truck tire and wedge it in the tire well? Am I getting a flat tire? Is something stuck in the engine compartment somewhere?

Actually, I really didn’t want to know as I drove on toward North Vernon and the mechanical acumen of son-in-law Joe. And when I pulled in front of their home on Christmas Eve, it felt like I’d found my own nativity scene of sorts with Joe as a Wise Man, inspecting the Jeep.

It was just a few moments later that Joe re-emerged from outside and slapped the four lugnuts from my left rear tire onto the dining room table. None of them had been tightened more than finger tight. He checked the other three tires, all of which I’d bought the day before Thanksgiving, and at least two lugnuts on each tire also hadn’t been properly tightened.

So the verdict was that even though I made it 100 miles, I probably wouldn’t have made it much farther before something dire occurred.

It was on to dinner and some heaping helpings of good stuff like ham and turkey, broccoli casserole and chicken and noodles.

However, somewhere around midnight my stomach started churning and pretty soon there was a full-scale barrage on my system.

No one else got sick. Everyone else ate the same food. My Columbo instincts pointed toward the ham, which conspiracy theorists noted was prepared by my e-wife. Certainly it was more likely the glaze that came with the ham, which I continued to taste well after the fact. After all, I am allergic to mustard (a fact that always throws people for some reason) along with eggs, penicillin and sulfa drugs. And if mustard seed had been mixed into that gruesome glaze, that was trouble for me.

It made for a terrible night and early morning. I chewed up all the Rolaids I could find before we could get some Pepto when the stores opened.

Not eating anything but crackers for a day and a half helped as I tried to sleep on the couch even though getting up from its low angle proved difficult. The first time, while in stocking feet, I tried to get up to use the bathroom and my right leg slid out at a 45-degree angle, killing my knee, before I could steady myself on a nearby dining room chair.

Being sick and sore and outstaying my welcome, I got up intending to leave first thing Monday morning. But it a hurry to get up, I went down, falling about as gracefully as Hans Gruber from the Nakatomi tower. Yes, I’d literally fallen and could not get up. I pushed up off the couch but when I went to grab the chair for support, it slid backward into the dining room, spinning me to the floor where I landed not so gently on my hip.

Getting up with slippery feet and a knee that wouldn’t bend was quite the dilemma but solved by Nicole and her nursing wherewithal and possession of a gait belt that she and a neighbor she’d texted for help used to yank me back up.

Frustrating, embarrassing, exhausting and time to go.

Just a two-hour drive home left with a knee that wouldn’t bend and go from smoothly accelerator to brake was all that remained for this Christmas story. And despite some heavy traffic at times, I followed Rudolph with this nose so bright and stayed to the right and kept my distance as much as possible back to home, sweet home.

Yippee-ki-yay, momma.

I could not let this day go by without sharing my “Brush with Greatness” moment as David Letterman used to call it, concerning football legend John Madden, who died Monday night.

My moment with the Hall of Fame football coach and television announcer, Miller Lite pitchman and Madden football video game namesake came one fall day at the old RCA Dome as I prepared to cover the Peyton Manning-led Colts but needed to run to the tiny pressbox men’s room just before kickoff.

As I was standing there doing my business, the door swung open and in charged Madden, heading for the other position, right next to me.

I stared straight ahead, smiled to myself and kept to my business, but boy oh boy, did I ever want to shout “Boom!” the way Madden always did diagramming a play. And you know what, I’ll bet he’d have loved it.