The holidays are that complicated time of year when I can’t wait to spoil my nephews with a Monster Jam Hot Wheels track and a sandbox excavator, but when I also agonize over where my family will choose to host our celebrations. Since becoming a wheelchair user in 2015, I no longer look at their homes as places of comfort. No, now I see each person’s home in terms of how I will enter it and how much independence I will lose in the process.

This year, my cousin invited me over for a girl’s game night/holiday party. I pulled into the driveway and groaned when I saw the setup outside her front door: A pair of two-by-fours balanced parallel to each other on the two-step entryway. In any other situation, I would have thought maybe they were doing a renovation or some project requiring lumber. Tonight, however, I knew immediately what the purpose was. My cousin intended to push me up the steps, with my wheels teetering ever so precariously on those two-by-fours. Mortified as I was, I couldn’t fault her for this situation. I don’t expect every member of my family to add ramps to the front of their houses for my comfort, but she had tried. Plus, when she and her husband built their house, they installed 36-inch doorways for their bathrooms just so I could relieve myself in peace. An ill-conceived “ramp” might be stressful at the moment, but as a manual wheelchair user, it was something simple to work around with two willing ladies to help — and nothing like the all-night dread of not having access to a washroom.

Which brings me to Christmas Eve at my aunt’s and uncle’s. Their house has an entryway of about eight stairs, steep and slippery in the Midwestern winter. Two guys carry me up, and the other five watch and give advice on how it could be done better. Last year a pulley system was suggested.

Inside, the layout is straight out of wheelchair users’ nightmares: small rooms, narrow hallways and even more stairs. The bathroom is the worst. My chair doesn’t fit through the doorway, so for me to use it, my cousin holds a small, round mechanic’s stool in place. I transfer onto it, then she carefully rolls me from door to toilet. All the while, I’m praying one of the tiny wheels doesn’t get caught in the cracks between the tiles to send me sprawling on the floor. When we get to the toilet, I transfer onto it. My cousin leaves so I can have a moment of peace. Once done, I’m now stranded and must yell for someone to come in and get me out. Nothing like hollering “All clear!” from the toilet during a holiday party to make you feel like a functional member of society.

Still, despite the inaccessibility, I keep coming back every year. Watching my nephews open their gifts and listening to my grandpa’s favorite old Christmas record makes it all worth it in the end. The holidays simply wouldn’t be the same without my family and their haphazard attempts to make me comfortable. Wheelchair users reading this undoubtedly have countless similar stories of the trials we must go through to simply hang out with friends and family. I hope this season we can all have a good laugh about our past failures and triumphs as we work together to build a more accessible holiday, no pulley system required.

Have your own inaccessible holiday stories? We’d love to hear them — the more ridiculous the better — in the comments below.