A Minnesotan

Christmas

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Not all but many holidays over the course of my childhood are marked with some kind of minor disaster. Like the Thanksgiving table fire, or the Christmas Eve were my sister and I accidentally did a 360 on the highway in between the fifth and sixth Christmas Eve service of the night. No one ever gets hurt in these minor disasters but they make the holiday memorable and make for a good story. One that came to me this year was the Christmas that the dishwasher shorted out. It was the Christmas of 2004, I was eight-years-old that year. Honestly, I cannot for the life of me remember what I got for Christmas that year. What I can remember is the events of the day. It was a typical Christmas of my childhood. We got up had breakfast and did stockings before Dad went off to work to do Christmas day services at the Medical Center in Rochester. The family would be coming over that evening for dinner and presents; in the meantime, we watched Christmas movies and worked on Christmas dinner.

I think it was a pretty normal Christmas that year… or at least it was until the dishwasher shorted out before dinner causing it to fill up with water. It was all going to be OK though because Grandpa, who had been a Navy Electrician, was going to fix it. All he needed to do was cut off the power to the dishwasher and take care of the problem.

Now the breaker box was in the garage, and I do not remember exactly how but the wrong breaker got turned off. So instead of turning off the power to the dishwasher the power to the oven got turned off instead. Which not only left Grandpa working on a live dishwasher, where thankfully nothing happened but stopped the oven.

The oven where the Christmas ham, that my mother had rubbed down with brown sugar and poured Cocacola over, had been baking. The oven that no one noticed was off until after the dishwasher had been taken care of.

I was eight that year so I don’t rightly remember if we even ended up eating the ham that day once the power mixup was noticed. But I will never forget the Christmas dishwasher disaster of 2004.