Alright! I am ready to share some holiday stories with you all just in time for Christmas. I think I should start with the statement that electric blankets are awesome. There is no heat in my parents' upstairs (never has been) and so when a storm rolled in Saturday night and the temperature dropped to eight degrees my room hit about twenty degrees by the time I woke up this morning. But now I have an electric blanket cranked up to high and as I sit here typing this, it warms my cold little heart.

So let me share with you Christmas in the McCall house:

Thursday night around midnight, a tired, cranky father goes to shut the light off in the kitchen. Unbeknownst to him a candle on a candle-warmer crouches, waiting for its moment to strike. As Father switches the light switch down the candle leaps under his hand thrusting its rim under his pinky finger getting caught by Father's large hand and swept off the counter onto the carpeted floor. Pine scented green candle wax splatters everywhere, woodwork, carpet, cabinets, t.v. remote and quickly hardens into a waxy veneer atop the carpet. Father spends an hour or two scrapping the wax off the carpet getting no where, looks up on the internet that one should place a paper towel over the wax-on-carpet and iron it to clean it up. The iron melts the wax, the towel soaks it up and voila. Little do I know as I lay on my friends' couch on Thursday night that this mess of wax-on-carpet and newfound ironing knowledge will be used to determine my Friday.

Friday morning I crawl into my parents' van where my mother relates the entire Candle Assaults Father story then tells me that I will have the pleasure of ironing the carpet when we get home as Father still needs to get the sink in the upstairs bathroom. So I get home; I pull out the iron. I sit down on the carpet and I go to work. There I am, ironing away getting all the wrinkles out along with the wax and my father runs downstairs to turn the water off, whistling a merry tune. I am then called up stairs to help put the cabinet the sink will sit on in place. We do so, I return to my ironing. A little while later my father comes back downstairs and turns the water back on. Shortly thereafter I hear the dulcet tones of my mother screaming. Dad forgot to turn the water valves off upstairs so when he turned the water on, it poured out of the now open pipes and flooded the bathroom soaking the carpet.

Mom runs downstairs and relays the news. I shrug (these things happen in this house fairly often) but then she screams again. The water is now leaking through the living room ceiling. Mom puts pots under the drips then calls out to me that we have to move the couch because it's too close to the leak. I rush in, move the loveseat then go for the couch. I crouch down and move it a little bit, getting my bearings and my mom moves behind it ready to push as I pull. I look at her and warn her to be careful, seeing my doom in her panicked eyes. I wasn't wrong. She shoves mightily, saving the couch from death by water and hits me in the chest, vaulting me backwards onto my ass. I remind her again, forcefully, that I wanted her to be careful.

The water was mopped up, the sink was installed, and I got all the wax out of the carpet. We figure the wax, the water, and the leak count for our "three" (we're slightly superstitious believing things come in threes) and so I'm hoping the rest of Christmas goes uneventfully. But I have one heck of a Christmas story. It is made only better if you know the history of my family and this house. We moved in during the summer of 1984. We've been "remodeling" ever since. Mostly because when we try to fix the sink up stairs, we destroy the ceiling downstairs. Those sorts of mistakes make sure the fun never stops.

And so I bid you adieu. I am warm under my electric blanket (the heat being one more thing that has yet to be fixed) and so tired of Christmas music I could scream. But I'm well fed, have my purse, and there's a sink in the upstairs bathroom. I can get to my bedroom without climbing over the ladder in the hall or stepping on a drill bit. These are all good things.

Merry Christmas to all and to all don't remodel over the holidays.