So let us lay it all out for you.

Our Christmas in this office was spent around a faulty router, awaiting the flickering of lights that, though bright green, had nothing to do with the Holy Day.

Over a cellphone line and at our service provider’s behest, we unplugged plugs, counted to 10 and plugged them in again. Nothing. So we counted to 10 to stem our frustration.

The router’s ruin meant no Internet and no phone service in this office. No Internet means no news wire and a lot worse. It can mean no newspaper, and we’ve never missed an edition, at least in some form, since the Stump family left Missouri 120 years ago to show us Texans what a newspaper looked like.

And though we can’t prove that 120-year string, we still accept it and embrace the responsibility of publishing through war and weather and locusts. OK, maybe not locusts.

By mid-afternoon Christmas, through the miracle of technology we don’t fully understand, we were back on line and building pages. Someone on the other end of the phone line had accomplished a Christmas miracle.

All went well until we took the last step to move the pages to the printer that night and, alas, the system again came tumbling down. We met the production crew halfway, at a gas station in Bridge City, and handed over a jump drive that kept our streak of 12 decades alive.

Alas, our good fortune did not last. We arrived at work Wednesday morning with the phones out and Internet down.

We spent the day working out of our own homes and at a local hotel and took a road trip to our sister paper in Orange to build pages. We waited for help from our service provider that never arrived.

We moved stories and photos to our server and, under the light of the moon, produced a flawed newspaper — no comics, no games, and one whopping misspelling — the best we could do with our limited capabilities and under the circumstances. And, OK, “under the light of the moon” is an exaggeration. But there were a lot of obstacles.

Thursday morning brought the tardy repairman, who had a new router under his arm. In the early morning light, he almost looked like Santa.

Phones returned and Internet is up … now. Callers got through to tell us they only buy the paper for the comics and games and why the heck weren’t we answering the phones?

One lady ridiculed our spelling gaffe in an email; in doing so, she misspelled the word “misspell” while lamenting our faulty proofreading.

It’s OK. It’s good to hear from all of you. To celebrate, we offer you an extra comics page today.