Hearing an expletive at 6 am was not a good way to start Christmas morning. Wife was getting ready to stuff turkey. I bounded down the stairs expecting to find a dead Santa or BIL beside the liquor cabinet. "No water.", she screamed at me as if this was another one of my devious plans to send her closer to the nut house. I did the obvious checks too, and found no problems. Being a rented house we had to call the landlord at 7 am, not a pleasant reception. "Call the plumber" was the response. Yeah, right. Oh, I forgot to mention that there are 5 in immediate family, 3 overnight guests and 6 more coming for dinner ar 4 pm. Called the local plumber and of course, he's already out on another farm call; his wife said "There goes our Christmas, but here comes our Carribean cruise".  Ted arrived about 11 and crawled down into the pit, which are now illegal in Ontario. He took out the pump and into his shop in town; came back; oops, back to town for new fitting; came back, oops back to town for new switch. Finally at 2:30 we had water, and turkey at 6 pm. At 9 pm, started a march to washroom as flu-like symptoms set in. Luckily the new pump performed under the added pressure. My daughter was the first and claimed it was the first time fresh turkey's fault. To this day she will only eat frozen poultry. I think it was regular flu that hit us as the only one who didn't get ill was my 75 year-old MIL, who was the only one who had been vaccinated with flu shot.

That was one of our more memorable Christmas' that was almost a disaster. Others were just run-of -the-mill laugh at them later.