Not all holidays are created equally. And sometimes, even your favorites don’t turn out quite the way you’d planned. But sometimes, they go so far off course, you just want a complete do-over
A few years back, we had one of the rockiest beginnings to a Christmas day that I can ever remember in my life.
We are a blended family, and so we take turns with the older kids’ other parents so that the kids wake up with us one Christmas, and wake up with their other parents on the next. This particular year was not our year for early morning wake-ups.
Since all of the older kids were at their other parents’ houses on this Christmas morning, and Spawn was so little, he didn’t know the difference anyway, we made the executive decision to sleep in. We desperately needed the rest, and holidays are a rare day off that we’d both get to enjoy sleeping late together.
But alas, it was not meant to be.
I was awakened around 8 a.m. by my smoke alarm going absolutely nuts, and my husband Eric shouting from the other end of the house:
LOVE!!! GET UP!
GET UP!
Get out of the house!
Get out of the house!
The house is on fire!
Get out!
The house is on fire!
I got up, dread pooling in the pit of my stomach, quickly pulled on a nightgown and my boots, and ran up the hall. The living room and kitchen were under a thick cloud of black smoke, and Eric was out on the porch with Spawn, hopping around foot to foot, hollering “The house is on fire!”
I looked in the kitchen, where I could see there were flames coming out of the oven. A more careful person would have just dialed 9-1-1 and left for safety, but no one has ever accused me of being overly cautious.
As he’s still outside doing the decapitated chicken dance of doom, I made the split second decision to go see if there was anything I could do quickly to save my house from burning down. I went to the kitchen, filled a glass with water, and threw it in the oven.
Pssssshhhhhhhhooosh!
It put the fire out, thankfully, but now the smoke was really billowing. And it smelled noxious. Almost like the smell of burning car tires.
I turned on the vent hood, the air conditioners, and opened all the windows.
We hung out on the porch for about half an hour, keeping an eye on things, and trying to make sure the majority of the smoke was dissipated before returning inside to inspect the damage.
Yall.
Whew.
Apparently, Eric and Spawn had gotten up much earlier. Spawn had thrown a toy in the oven, at some point previously. And then Eric went to pop some food in the oven for himself, and didn’t notice the toy laying there below the rack.
Nothing, besides the melty ruins of an unidentifiable toy, had suffered any real damage. But the house smelled like melting plastic and burning tires for the rest of the day.
Christmas really had nowhere to go but UP from there.
Here’s wishing a very merry and SAFE Christmas to you and yours!
p.s. Regarding my completely ill-advised tossing of the water into the oven: Don’t YOU do that. I have been informed since this happened that you should always use salt to put out kitchen fires, since most kitchen fires are caused by grease, and water would just exacerbate a grease fire. i could have really hurt myself or made the fire worse, and it’s just pure luck that it worked out okay.
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