All I want for Christmas is... or I Wish My Kitchen Appliances Would Stop Turning On Me

So picture this scenario: it is Christmas Eve 2008 and after a long day of preparing, snacking, and celebrating, the main course for dinner is just about ready. All the hungry friends and relations are at the table, and 5 minutes before the pasta finishes boiling the stove emits a strange series of loud bongs and its display is flashing some strange alien language.

Bong? What the hell is bonging?

Are the shrimp calling the mother ship asking for an emergency beam-out? Have the squid stormed the fortress and the revolution is about to begin? Is the pasta about to rise from the pot and seek its revenge, tangling all of its in its sticky tentacles as it slowly digests us over the course of dozen years?

Or is the most likely scenario that the range has taken this very moment in time, a table full of hungry holiday revelers, dinner minutes from being either consumed or ruined, to decide that it no longer wants to exist on this earthly plane?

A check of the owners manual verifies the worst. The language in the troubleshooting guide was just a polite way of saying "Ha ha sucker! Are you ever screwed!"

At least (at least, he says) it was 'only' the oven that took itself off-line, something about the appliance electronics equivalent of a dysfunctional family Christmas, with one electronic controller refusing to talk to another over something that may or may not have happened several decades ago but so scarring and jarring we'll take this argument to our graves. Or maybe something just short-circuited.

We managed to finish cooking with one finger (guess which) on the reset button to silence the cooktop's incandescent urgency and loud bobs of pain. The camp stove was quickly set up as a backup, and the meal continued unabated. But for the next week we have a stove up on blocks, the redneck kitchen equivalent of a dead truck on blocks in the front yard, as I set out to repair its faulty electronics. At least I got off cheap and knock wood it has been working fine ever since.


Fast forward to 2009, Christmas week. Family in town for an early Christmas dinner. Smoked turkey breast, a 6 pounder smoked in a tad under 6 hours. It came out beautiful, moist, and very delicious. Good food, good wine, family, stories, celebrations. We're all tired at the end of the evening. Good thing we have a dishwasher to help with the cleanup.

Or do we? The damned dishes were cleaner when we put them in the beast than when we took them out. The noises it made sounded like Satan himself was cleaning the china.

Yup, this year I now have a dishwasher up on blocks, awaiting repair.

I wonder if I should shoot the refrigerator now or wait until next Christmas?