Hallway to Heaven

Every other Christmas, my extended family gets together with one of the four sisters on my Mom's side (This is including my mom). On our off years, we're together with just our immediate family, and Christmas is nice and easy, but every other year we travel somewhere else on the West Coast (No one seems to have moved very far), struggle with hotels and fitting into the host's house, while we try to help with the cooking before we can finally open presents and leave.

This Christmas, however, we're hosting the extended family, for the first time in almost a decade (at the very least, the first time I can remember). Even now, months ahead of the fact, Mom has been stressing out, preparing the place. She's getting the walls painted and the guest room cleared out, redecorating where she can to make everything seem bigger so we can fit everyone in.

I'm trying hard not to make this into a Christmas blog, so I'll move on to where I wanted to go. About a month back, Mom moved the computer to a new desk in our hallway, where it's out of the way and needs all of the lights on to see properly. As she proudly inspected her change, Mom realized suddenly that there are exactly nine doors in out hallway (if you don't count the double-door for the master bedroom). Our hallway, mind you, connects every room in out house that isn't the front room or kitchen.


The nine doors seemed to shock Mom a bit, for some reason. She had everything clean and newly painted, and with all the doors closed, she said "it looks like a hotel hallway." I kinda agree, except for the part that hotel hallways are straightforward and less organic.

A few weeks later, Mom picked up brass street numbers at the hardware store - one through nine. It took her a few weeks after that to get around to hot-gluing them to the various doors around our hallway.

So now our hallway really does look like a hotel hallway. I'm in room one, by the way, and my parents in nine. A friend of mine, seeing the picture I posted on Facebook, asked what all the rooms were to, and unable to give a straight reply, I had to reply: "Number 1 is to my room, number 2 is a guest room, number 3 in the garage, number 4 goes to Narnia, number 5 is a bathroom, number 6 is a teleportation portal to the outer reaches of the universe, number 7 we're saving for locking up people who knock on our door, number 8 leads to our personal slave factory, and number 9 is the master bedroom." Mom mom replied, "I had to number them, it was so inconvenient trying to go to the bathroom and accidentally ending up in Narnia."

So now when people come to our house, and ask to use the bathroom, instead of saying "It's straight down the hall, on the left," we can say "It's number five."