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Ed Knob and Pirate Oil
What would the holiday season be without hiccups? I know it wouldn’t be the holidays if something didn’t go awry. For us, there was the New Year’s Day dinner with close friends and family. The dinner was in the oven, drinks were being poured, appetizers were being consumed. All seemed pretty shiny and bright. I heard the kitchen timer ding. When I opened the oven door, as if possessed, it fell to the floor (completely off the hinges) with such a thunk the thermometer popped out too. There I was, halfway through the cooking time, with an oven door on the floor and a thermometer lying beside it. Thank goodness in the good old days microwaves were behemoths and the dinner finished cooking in the monster-wave. No one in the living room had any idea of the disaster bubbling in the kitchen. They were very caught up in their Ed Knob and Pirate Oil.
So, was that the “worst” holiday ever? Well, it wasn’t even a bad holiday event. It was just a glitch. And, actually, it was pretty darned funny. I didn’t tell the guests what had happened because one of the guests prided himself on being a Mr. Fixit, and I wasn’t in the mood for a homemade pressure treated truss/barricade holding oven door closed. Don’t get me wrong, he was a sweet guy and a very good family friend, but sometimes his fixie-fixies were stunning, frightening, scary and often didn’t work, or if they did work someone’s life would have been in peril. Nope, the funniest/worst holiday disaster was what our family refers to as “The Christmas Tree from Hell” Christmas. Our family home has nine-and-half-foot ceilings downstairs, so we used to purchase a tall tree from the local greenhouse guy. Usually the tree was so big we couldn’t bring it home in our vehicle, and Greenhouse Guy could be convinced to drop it off on his way home at the end of the day. And, on that particular day, The Tree from Hell arrived with a house shaking thump on our side porch. We were in the middle of after-dinner dishes and dining- room-table-homework, so the tree spent the night outside. Everyone was excited about getting the tree up and decorated, and the very next day LOML set to cutting a little bit off the bottom of TTFH, then finding the big red tree stand and the wire to anchor the tree to the wall. Once all of the engineering, structural adjusting and lighting was done, the decorating began.
On that fateful Christmas in 1993, no less than four cartons of decorations were brought downstairs, lovingly unwrapped and carefully placed on the holiday tree. When we finished, our youngest child tucked, and chucked, about six boxes of “tinkle” on the branches she could reach. Needless to say, all of the tinsel/tinkle was located on one side of the tree, about three feet from the floor. We then stood back to ooh, ahh over our handiwork and enjoy one more festive beverage and head to bed. Now, at our house the tree usually goes up on the first weekend of December, meaning the children would still have been heading to classes in the morning and “we”, the parental units, had jobs to attend. LOML and I had barely tucked ourselves in when we heard the skin-crawling sound of a one-hundred-plus-pound tree hitting the deck and taking hostages on the way down. It was barely midnight, and there we were re-engineering the stand (anchoring it with two thirteen inch concrete blocks), then adding extra reinforcing ties to the wall and sweeping up the sparkly remains of heirloom decorations. One more Ed Knob with Pirate Oil and we headed back to bed, both of us too tense to get any really deep sleep. The next morning, TTFH fell as I was packing lunches and the children were eating their breakfast. The older kids hooted and laughed. The youngest cried pitifully and with a mouthful of toast mumbled, “No Santa for us”. LOML and I quickly devised yet another way to keep the tree upright and off to school and work we headed. When we returned home in the evening, The Tree from Hell was still upright, but crashed twice before dinner and the next day had dawned. We reckon we gave up after a dozen more falls, de-decorated, de-tinseled and dragged TTFH outside and rammed it in a snow drift. We then unboxed an ancient artificial tree. Youngest child wailed, older children rolled with laughter, parents put paid to the Ed Knob and Pirate Oil.
Much to our youngest’s relief, Santa came on the appointed night. Presents were opened. Stockings were fished through. The artificial tree—all four feet and 35 branches of it—did its job. The Tree from Hell, with a twinkle of the odd bit of tinkle, stood proudly in the snowdrift for the next three months. Not once in those months did TTFH waver, crash, dive or sprawl. Youngest proclaimed it to be a miracle every time she begged to go outside and visit the TTFH.
Lesson learned. Apparently LOML and I had purchased an outdoor tree when we should have been more specific about our holiday needs.
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