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# Christmas Was Not Cancelled
- URL: https://being-prepared.ghost.io/christmas-was-not-cancelled/
- Published: 2026-09-01T14:00:52.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-01T14:00:52.000Z
- Author: Robert Yonaitis

A few winters ago a strong storm moved through New Hampshire. Trees and lines came down across a wide area. In our location the outage lasted more than seventy-two hours. That is a hard storm even by local standards, but it is not a rare one.

The previous summer we had installed a whole-house generator and made a habit of checking propane and running maintenance on schedule. When the power failed, the transition was almost unremarkable. Heat stayed on. Lights worked. The refrigerator and freezers kept running.

Family staying with us for Christmas kept their routines. Meals happened on time. Gifts were exchanged. 

Most people do not lose a week of life in an outage. They lose the ordinary evening. The movie does not play. The house gets cold. The freezer becomes a clock. Kids get restless. Adults get short. The event is not cinematic. It is inconvenient, then uncomfortable, then expensive if it lasts.

Seventy-two hours is long enough to turn inconvenience into a problem. Pipes. Food. Heat. Medications that need a stable house. A neighbor whose furnace will not start. That is the failure mode worth planning for in the northern United States — not the movie version of collapse, the winter version of a long outage.

Because the system was already in place and serviceable, we could also run an extension cord to a neighbor. Their furnace, freezer, and basic household needs kept working. Helping them did not reduce our own margin. That only works if you prepared before the storm, not during it.

Nothing about the event was dramatic. It was the kind of multi-day winter outage that occurs regularly across this region. The difference was that the failure had been anticipated, the equipment had been installed and maintained, and no last-minute scramble was required when the lights went out.

The same principle applies whether you live where outages last days or where they last hours. The scale of the solution may change. The discipline does not: identify the ordinary failures that affect your location, prepare for them before they occur, and keep the preparations in working order.

A cancelled movie night is a nuisance. A cancelled Christmas in a cold house is a failure of planning. Preparedness is what keeps the first from becoming the second.

**Key takeaways**

- Scenario inflation pulls attention toward dramatic but unlikely events while the most common disruptions remain under-addressed.
- Effective contingency thinking focuses on probable failure modes: power loss, supply interruptions, medical needs, weather extremes, short-term civil disturbance, and the possibility that the primary planner is unavailable.
- The goal is readiness for the general shape of the problem, not prediction of its exact details.
- The most useful test of whether preparations are real is an ordinary event — the kind that occurs every year in your region, not the kind that has never occurred anywhere.
- Equipment and plans only matter if they are already in place and maintained when the disruption arrives.
- Scenario inflation and complacency are mirror failures. One plans for too much that will never happen. The other plans for too little that already has.

If you want the same idea in more detail — systems instead of shopping lists, what you already have, what you still need, and how to keep a household able to stand on its own — that is the subject of Understanding Preparedness: A Practical Guide to Self-Reliant Readiness. It is available as a Kindle edition and as an audiobook on Amazon: [https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Preparedness-Practical-Guide-Self-Reliant/dp/B0HG47C9TR/ ](https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Preparedness-Practical-Guide-Self-Reliant/dp/B0HG47C9TR/?ref=being-prepared.ghost.io)