A Saturday night house fire has left a Mesquite family with nothing but the clothes on their backs. But while their lives will take months, if not years, to rebuild, their faith in Christmas spirit is already being quickly restored.
Joel Chapman and Brooke Porter's young son noticed the fire first. He was playing video games in the living room, heard a loud noise, took off his headphones and opened the door to the garage and found a raging inferno.
"All you could see when you looked through the door into the garage was just fire," Chapman said. "By the time I made it to the kitchen all you could see was fire."
"When I ran out of the house I was in my underwear. I was getting ready to go to bed. I was literally in the front yard watching the house burn....in my underwear."
The fire consumed the garage first, including an ATV, motorcycles, the washer and dryer and every tool and every keepsake they had stored there. The living room was gutted next. The fire even reached, and destroyed, Chapman's pickup truck and his plumbing company van in the driveway. He didn't have time to find the keys and move them before the fire exploded through the garage door.
"It's terrible," Chapman said. "That's all I can say. It's just a terrible situation."
The fire department told them this terrible situation looks accidental, perhaps electrical. But their insurance company hasn't been to the house yet, telling them holiday staffing might delay an adjuster arriving.
But while Joel will tell you he's not much for Christmas anyway, and that while Christmas is precisely the wrong time anyone would want this to happen, this devastating fire is showing them something else too: the kindness of strangers.
"We've been incredibly blessed. Definitely," Porter said. "We've even had little girls bring us money from their piggy bank."
Another young girl from their Mesquite neighborhood also handed them the $10 she'd been saving for her own Christmas.
"Every little bit counts and helps. It's been awesome, as far as that goes," Joel said of the help they are also receiving from their friends, family, and employers. "I don't know if that [Christmas] really had anything to do with it. But it does seem like a lot of people have been reaching out to us and trying to help us out as much as they could."
While Chapman and Porter and their two children stay temporarily with other family members north of Dallas, their friends and family have set up a GoFundMe page to help them through the months it could take for them to have a home of their own again.
"It does kind of at points feel like it's my life that I lost," Chapman said. "But honestly it's not my life. I'm standing right here. I got her with me," he said standing next to Brooke. "And it's all stuff that can be replaced when it all comes down to it. It's just going to take a long time!"
A long time to piece their lives back together. But their faith in this thing called Christmas spirit is already being quickly restored.