Christmas Eve, some time in the mid-90s.
We'd done the Santa run, it was late, we were full of cups of tea and festive chocolate biscuits, and my parents couldn't be arsed to cook, so we stopped at the chippy for tea. My dad parked round the corner from it and went in for five bags of chips and some mushy peas.
None of us left in the car realised he'd left the lights on, the queue was pretty long in there, and by the time he got back to the car, the battery was flat and it wouldn't start.
Oh.
Fortunately we only lived a few streets away, so we walked home, ate the chips and rang an uncle to come round with some jump leads. He did, Dad got the car home and the incident went down as a minor Christmas blip.

Christmas Eve is pretty routine in our family.
We're on our way back from my nana's, Mam suggests we have chips again, we all make jokes about last year, park in the same street and Dad goes round to the chippy.
Usual long wait, Dad gets back, we fight over who gets to hold the chips...
"You're JOKING..."
You guessed it, once again the car wouldn't start.
We rang a different uncle to get it started this time.

It well and truly cemented chips on Christmas Eve as a tradition.

About three years ago, on 23rd December, my sister was going to see a friend's band in in some small village near us, and as usual, Dad played taxi, but didn't have a clue where the venue was. Sis pulled up a vague map, and they set off.
About an hour later, we got a phone call from her.
They'd been crawling along the road, trying to see where the venue was. It was dark, and Dad was looking up at the buildings along the road without remembering to check the road itself. Which had a crossing where the road was narrowed to one lane (I don't know how to describe it better).
The car was now hugging a lamp post on this crossing.

Good thing he doesn't read this, really, he doesn't take kindly to anyone mentioning it. The car made a full recovery.

Most spectacularly, last year, the day before I was due to come home from university before Christmas, my dad was driving home from Durham when the trusty big red car decided to blow up on the A690, in rush hour. Sadly, it never recovered from this.

My dad's not allowed to drive at Christmas now.
(and now for someone completely different, Mon 26 Apr 2010, 15:38, Reply)