The Christmas season is often a time for cherished family traditions, beautiful decorations, and the pursuit of that “perfect Christmas.” In the year 2000, Carla Harris, like many Southern moms, was striving for just that, meticulously preparing her home and family for the holidays, dreaming of idyllic photos for their annual Christmas card. But just days before December 25th, an unexpected event struck: a powerful tornado ripped through, reducing her family’s home to rubble and sweeping away all their carefully planned holiday joy.
It’s hard to imagine something wonderful emerging from such devastating loss, especially right before Christmas. Yet, Carla’s incredible true story reveals just that. From the ashes of destruction, her family discovered a profound testament to resilience, community spirit, and the enduring power of hope. Join us as Carla Harris shares her moving account of the “Perfect Christmas,” proving that sometimes, the greatest blessings are found not in what we meticulously plan, but in the unexpected gifts we receive.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: And we’re back with our American Stories and with another Christmas episode for our Christmas Special. All month long, we’re playing Christmas Stories. It’s hard to believe that something wonderful could come out of a family’s house filled with presents, decorations, food, and memories being completely blown away by a tornado just days before Christmas. But once you hear this story from Carla Harris, you just might be convinced otherwise. Here’s Carla with the story of the Perfect Christmas.
00:00:45
Speaker 2: I think any mother can identify, especially a mom in the South who gets Southern Living magazine, can identify with warning Christmas to be absolutely perfect.
00:00:57
Speaker 3: And by that I.
00:00:58
Speaker 2: Mean the table has spread a certain way, you serve certain dishes, you have the special people over in your family, you entertain friends, and your house needs to look like the cover of a magazine with garland draped across the front porch rails and wreaths across the windows, and everything just seemingly perfect. And that’s what I was striving for Christmas of two thousand, which is extremely hard to do when you have two little boys and you’re trying to get a perfect Christmas picture. Because these were the days before social media, and everyone sent a family Christmas card. And since my husband Richie and I had lived in two different cities in Georgia before moving back to Alabama, where our home was, that’s how we kept up with our friends sending Christmas cards. So the picture had to be perfect. And I think every mom can also identify with the fact that that’s nearly impots when your subjects are four and nineteen months old and they’re both little boys. So that’s where we were in December of two thousand. It was December sixteenth, nine days before Christmas. I had been through three rolls of thirty-six exposure film and I still didn’t have a decent Christmas card to send out. And I was determined this Saturday morning, on December sixteenth, that if it was the last thing I did, I was going to get a perfect Christmas card. So I sat both of the boys down in front of the Christmas tree in their Christmas sweatshirts, and we were going to take the Christmas picture. Now, Jackson wanted to hold his Rabbit. He was given Rabbit by my Mom and Dad before he was born, and it became his very favorite toy. And we didn’t go anywhere without that stuffed animal. And I can’t tell you how many times we had to turn around because we realized Rabbit was left behind. Rabbit was so loved that his eyes were no longer shiny and plastic; they were scratched, he was threadbare, his neck flopped to one side. He’d been washed multiple times because things had been spilled on him, and he was dirty from being dragged everywhere. And he always brought comfort to Jackson, no matter what the situation.
00:03:19
Speaker 3: So he was determined Rabbit was going to be in the picture.
00:03:22
Speaker 2: And I said, “Oh, no, this picture is just going to be of you and your brother Clay. Rabbit’s going to have to sit off to the side.” So I sat them down, and we took the Christmas picture in front of the Christmas tree. And these were also in the days before iPhones and instant cameras, so you had to take your film to be processed. So the idea was that Clay, who was nineteen months old at the time, and I would go to the twenty-four-hour photo processing booth at the local drugstore, and Richie was going to take Jackson, who was four, shopping at the mall. And I should have known something was off that Saturday morning when Richie said, “You know, I want to go shopping today.” Guys don’t want to go shopping usually, and Richie had never said that before, nor has he said that since, so.
00:04:10
Speaker 3: That’s kind of become a joke.
00:04:11
Speaker 2: We should have known right then that God was preparing our family for what was going to happen. But he took Jackson, and they went to the mall to do some last-minute Christmas shopping. So Clay and I went to the twenty-four-hour photo processing place, and the one closest to our house was broken, so we had to drive about twenty minutes across town to the next closest drugstore that had the photo processing booth, and there was a lot of film to be processed, and we had a while to wait, so I just decided, since it was getting close to Clay’s naptime, we would drive back over to my parents’ house and visit with them, as we often did on the weekend. And when we walked in, my Daddy, who is an avid weather watcher, had the news on the weather station, watching the meteorologist who was tracking storms at the time. Storms in the South are nothing new because of where we’re located on the river and the way we often get really warm weather in the winter months and really cold weather in the spring months. It just calls us tornadoes. And I remember that morning having sweatshirts on the boys, and when Richie went to take them out, he had them in shorts, and I said, “Richie, it’s December. They need to have jackets on,” and he said, “Have you not been outside today?” And I walked out back, and I remember thinking, “Goodness, it is way too warm for December sixteenth.” I believe it was seventy-something degrees that day, so obviously the storms were coming. And by the time we got to Mom and Daddy’s house, they were spotting storms in the area. I was in the kitchen with my Mom, and we were planning, making the last preparations for the Christmas menu for family Christmas dinner, when all of a sudden, Daddy jumped up and said, “Let’s go—the storms on top of us!” My parents lived on a slab foundation. They didn’t have a basement, so the couple behind them, whose backyard backed up to my Mom and Daddy’s, had a basement. And my Daddy said, “Come on, get Clay, and let’s run across the yard to Mister and Missus Jagger’s basement.” So we did, and as we started across the yard, my Daddy looked up in the sky, and the trees were blocking it, but we could see the top of that tornado. It was surreal, and I remember picking up speed, and we ran to the Jaggers’ basement, where we waited it out, and all I could think of was…
00:06:37
Speaker 3: Where were Richie and Jackson?
00:06:39
Speaker 2: I knew they were at the mall, and I didn’t know if they would know how bad the weather was. And I also didn’t know if they were in a safe spot, so all I could think about was them, and we waited the storm out. We were listening on a little radio, and as soon as the weather cleared up, we came out of the basement, and you never know what you’re going to find, but everything looked just fine. There’s always a sense of calm after a bad storm, and we just thought everything was fine, and we went back to Mom and Daddy’s house and walked in their kitchen, and I just had the most uneasy feeling, and I couldn’t explain it, and I said, “Daddy, I just feel like I need to go check on our house.” Now, our house was about three miles from my Mom and Dad’s neighborhood, and he said, “Well, I’ll go with you,” and my Mama said, “I’ll keep Clay.” Daddy and I got in the car, and I was driving, and we started out for my house. And everything looked fine going out of their neighborhood and even down Highway Sixty-Nine, which is the path we take to get to my house. But as we got closer, I noticed that the traffic lights were out, and there were cars pulled off to the side of the road, people milling around, and it just didn’t look right. There was just an eerie, foreboding feeling in the atmosphere. And we turned down the parkway to go to our neighborhood, and you have to pass another neighborhood before you got to the entrance of Hours, and I noticed that that fence was blown down to the neighborhood before Hours, but that happened a lot. Anytime there was a strong wind, they would lose that entire fence. And I even joked to my daddy, “Oh goodness, they’ve lost the fence to Remington again!” But then I looked up beyond Remington, which is where our neighborhood backs up, and I saw that there were roofs gone off of houses, and everything at that point just started to blur, and I said, “Daddy,” and my hands started shaking on the steering wheel because I knew my house was on that hill that I was looking at. And he said, “Baby, just drive.” And we got to the entrance of my neighborhood, and there were armored vehicles. The National Guard had already arrived, and they were stopping people at the entrance, and we had to show—I had to show my driver’s license to prove that I lived in there—and they let us turn up into the neighborhood. And when I turned onto our street, I just couldn’t believe it. It looked like a bomb had gone off. And had I not known which lot ours was, I would not have ever recognized what used to be our house. So not only was the house not picture-perfect for Christmas, it was gone.
00:09:23
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Carla Harris share her story of her not-so-perfect Christmas, and that’s something not only Southern women take seriously, but moms across the country and Dad’s take seriously. And they were going about their business on December sixteenth, two thousand. Dad was at the shopping mall. Mom is with family. She enters the neighborhood, and as she said, “My house wasn’t just not perfect; it was gone.” When we come back, we’ll learn what happens next with Carla Harris here on our American Stories. And we returned to our American Stories and our Christmas Special. All month long, we’re playing Great Christmas Stories. When we last left off, Carla Harris had just pulled up at her home a few days before Christmas to find out it had been completely blown away by a tornado. Let’s pick up where we last left off.
00:10:33
Speaker 2: The entire attic level was gone, the garage was gone. The interior walls were all that was remaining. There was water spewing from a pipe that had been in the ground. There were pieces of garland flying in the wind out of tree branches. And we had had the most beautiful oak tree in our backyard. Our neighborhood had once been a pasture, and you know those one-hundred-year-old oak trees that you see in the middle of a pasture? That’s what was in our backyard. It shaded the entire backyard, and there was not a single leaf or branch barely left on that tree. It had plastic draped from somewhere that had blown into it, and it was horrible-looking. And that’s the description of what used to be our neighborhood. And I was just trying to process it. And about the time that we got there and walked up towards the house, Richie and Jackson pulled up, and I just remember collapsing into Richie’s arms, just sobbing, and he just kept saying, “I am so sorry. I am just so sorry.” As if he could do anything to prevent this or to have caused it in any way, but that’s just the love he shows me. And so we just stepped into what used to be our house, and we just started looking around, and I remember thinking, thinking, “This is supposed to be Christmas.” Christmas is nine days away, and what are we going to do? We don’t have any presents for the boys; we don’t have a tree anymore; we don’t even have any furniture; we don’t have any dishes. And I just realized all of a sudden that people were around us, working, salvaging things that belonged to us and asking us where we wanted things to be placed, and we didn’t even know them. People showed up out of nowhere to help us.
00:12:38
Speaker 3: People that we didn’t know, people to this day that we.
00:12:41
Speaker 2: Still don’t know—just angels on Earth—putting things in boxes and hauling stuff into the back of Richie’s trucks so we could take it to my Mom and Daddy’s, and salvaging what could be salvaged. And I noticed Jackson walking around. He had his little hands clasped behind his back, and he was looking down at the ground, and I remember thinking, “What in the world is this four-year-old thinking?”
00:13:10
Speaker 3: And then it dawned on me, “He’s looking for Rabbit!”
00:13:15
Speaker 2: I’m trying to figure out how we’re going to piece our lives together, that we’ve lost everything, and to this four-year-old, the only thing that mattered was his Rabbit.
00:13:26
Speaker 3: But as Richie and.
00:13:27
Speaker 2: I went through our house, one thing was inescapable: and that is the presence of God. Most of our house was gone with a wind force that I can’t even imagine. There was a picture of Richie and me that used to be on Jackson’s dresser in his bedroom, and it landed in my Mom and Daddy’s neighborhood over three miles away, and yet not one figure in our Nativity Set was toppled over or broken. It hadn’t even been moved. Not one angel in our house was broken. There were pine needles that had been driven with such force that they were sticking straight out of the drywall in a bathroom, and yet my Bible was still sitting on my bedside table, just where I had left it. And when I picked up my Bible and started looking through the pages, the pages were wet and had an acrid smell—like a fishy smell—from the water and wind that had blown through them. And every page had rufing grit in between them, like a shingle—the gritty part of a roofing shingle. The wind had literally blown that Bible open, and into every page in just a matter of seconds, had inserted roofing grit. And yet that Bible never moved from the nightstand, and it was still sitting there. And it’s like God spoke to me loud and clear and said to me, “I am with you. I will never leave you, I will never forsake you. And while the winds calm and blow and uproot the foundation of your life. I calmed the storm.” And I knew that everything was going to be okay. And about that time, I heard everybody shrieking with excitement, and I looked over into the backyard, and there was my brother-in-law,
00:15:44
Speaker 3: Holding up Rabbit!
00:15:46
Speaker 2: Even though a picture in Jackson’s bedroom had landed three miles away, Rabbit, who had been on Jackson’s bed, was safely protected under the rubble of the wall in Jackson’s bedroom that fell.
00:16:01
Speaker 3: And I also knew…
00:16:02
Speaker 2: That everything was going to be okay for Jackson. And what I learned that Christmas is that Christmas went on because Christmas was nothing about the garland and the pictures and the Christmas table and the menu and the presence.
00:16:25
Speaker 3: Even though people came up…
00:16:28
Speaker 2: And tapped us on the back as we were cleaning up rubble and whispered in our ear, “We put some Christmas presents in your backseat for the boys.” You know, Christmas still went on in that regard. We were able to live with my Mom and Daddy, and the boys had a better Christmas with toys and gifts than they could have imagined.
00:16:49
Speaker 3: But the real meaning of.
00:16:50
Speaker 2: Christmas never dwindled, because unlike all of those things that I thought had to be perfect, Christmas was made perfect over two thousand years ago with the birth of Jesus Christ, who was the greatest gift ever given to mankind and provided salvation for our souls when we put our trust in Him. And so I went on, and I made a Christmas picture that year, and it was perfect, not because the boys were sitting still or had perfect smiles on their faces. They continued with all the little antics that they normally did when I tried to take a picture of them, being silly boys at four and nineteen months.
00:17:40
Speaker 3: But I was…
00:17:41
Speaker 2: Able to send that picture out to all of the friends and family that I normally would have with a note that said, “Christmas looks different this year than we ever could have imagined.” We lost our home—well, we lost our house on December sixteenth, two thousand—but we didn’t lose our home because our home is the family that we have, no matter where we settle together. And what I learned that Christmas is that Christmas was made perfect by the only One who could make it perfect. And I try to remember that every Christmas sense, that it’s not about the busyness, it’s not about buying the gifts and decorating the house and looking like the spread of a Southern Living magazine. It’s about focusing on the true meaning of Christmas, and that’s what makes the holiday perfect.
00:18:45
Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the editing and storytelling by our own Medisine Derricot, and a special thanks to Carla Harris. In her words, there were no trees, no presents, no furniture, no dishes, but people were all around us, helping us. We did—we didn’t even know—angels on Earth. And she also said, as we went through the house, one thing was clear, and all around us, it was clear: the presence of God. God spoke to me loud and clear. “I am with you. I will never forsake you.” The true story of Christmas—one of the best we’ve done. Carla Harris’s story here on our American Stories.
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