Betty saved the day

Christmas morning began like any other, Robbie & I piled onto Brad at 6:15am screaming that Santa had been and left presents! Time to get up!! Robbie is very patient but sure does love Xmas morning and opening presents. I bought a stocking from Walmart with a bunch of toys in it and wrapped each toy individually so he had a lot of presents to unwrap. He just loves it so much!

A gift from my Mum

Robbie opening one of his presents, we just hold it and he pulls the paper off. He gets soooo excited.

A gift from Brad's Mum, a letter opener from his Father's desk

Excitement 101

Opening another gift

Psycho Xmas morning dog

Elephant gift from Stacey

Robbie had about 8 gifts under the tree, including cookies from Grandma, which he looooooves

By the end of it, he was worn out from the excitement

On to making our Christmas dinner....

Brad always makes Christmas dinner so he was in the kitchen having just put the turkey into the preheated oven, we were talking through the pass through when something went bang.

The cooktop and oven are each on their own and separate individual breaker boxes which are in the cupboards below them and they are each about 6 feet apart.

The cooktop flipped a breaker -- except it wasn't even on! I flipped it back on and it started sparking. I quickly reached in to turn it back off while Brad was yelling at me not to touch it.... I didn't think we should leave it on given it was sparking and smoke was billowing out of the knob which is missing (we have to use needle nose pliers to turn it because the knobs are made of plastic and the stove is often hot - go figure, so they have all to some degree melted and split making them hard or impossible to turn anymore)....  Man, the electrics in this house are certainly questionable, this isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened since we moved in.

Cooktop in question

Flipped breaker

Oven stayed on.... 

Since the oven remained working, and the potatoes were in with the Turkey, we decided (since we can no longer use the cooktop) we could boil the kettle and finish our meal that way. We had Stove top stuffing (in a box), and plenty of freeze dried food so I went downstairs and found some freeze dried gravy I made last year and corn. We just boiled the kettle, added the hot water to the gravy and corn and managed to salvage a smaller but wonderful Christmas meal regardless of the cooktop. 

I messaged our Landlord and advised her of the situation and she is having someone come and fix it after the holiday. We don't have a operational woodstove either, she has been sending someone to fix that for the last couple of months. Hope the cooktop gets fixed faster.

Turkey out of the oven

Freeze dried foods soaking in hot water

A lovely dinner in spite of it all

Robbie with his new toys

We hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas with as many friends and family as possible given the state of the world today. 

PS Betty is the name of our Freeze Dryer.