A Funny yet Creepy Christmas Story

Just thought I would share an interesting story about my Christmas this year. I need to first explain our house a bit. Our house is laid out where our garage is on the side of the house so you have to walk around the garage to get to the front door so we often just open our garage door and let those who visit come in through our garage. So our garage door is often found open. We also live up on a hill so we have a few steps that lead to a landing before you enter our back door. That said, we opened our garage door Christmas morning for my husband to shovel the beautiful snow that had fallen the night before. After breakfast and gift opening I walked outside to throw out the garbage when I almost stepped in a pile of poop right outside our back door. I called my husband and asked if he had seen it when he had gone out to shovel before, he hadn’t. A bit perplexed we shrugged it off to the neighbor’s dog who often can be found walking in our garage. I cleaned it up and we went on with our day. A bit later my husband went back to the garage to put a book into his backpack to take to work only to find a huge mess inside his backpack. He had forgotten to take out a few gifts he had been given before Christmas (he is a teacher) and all his candy was unwrapped and eaten. We figured then that it was probably not the neighbors dog that had be rummaging around in our garage. The first thought was it must have been a raccoon, what else could it be? I was pretty freaked out by now and didn’t want to be in the garage or have my children in the garage. We were hopeful it was not in the garage anymore but we needed to be sure. So we went over to my parent’s house to borrow their live trap. We placed a piece of bacon in the trap and set it. After watching a movie, we decided to go see if we had caught anything. We had. . .this is what was in our trap…no it’s not a giant rat-though it does look like one…

It’s an opossum. Can’t say I knew we even had opossums in Minnesota. It was very creepy to look at at 11:00 at night. We left it in the trap over night and Jeff read up on opossums on the web. We weren’t sure what to do with it. After reading that they are actually good for the environment and are wandering animals (I didn’t want it coming back to visit) we decided to let it go in a field close to our home. We all bundled up the day after Christmas and drove our opossum friend to his new home. Our girls thought it was so cute they wanted to keep him for a pet. We tried explaining the wild animal aspect but they didn’t buy it. Needless to say the moral of the story is close your garage door! Okay maybe it was just a fluke, but I am still closing my garage door!