The day our freezer broke down

This blog post is my  entry into the Tots100/PartSelect ’Love Your Appliance’ competition.

We've recently bought a new freezer because our old one packed up (thankfully it was fairly empty).  I can't be without my freezer, it's so convenient and means leftovers can be saved for another day. However, it always seems to be freezers that conk out in our family. With Christmas fast approaching, you can bet the mention of a freezer will trigger someone in the family to tell the story of when our freezer broke down one Christmas.

I was about ten years old at the time. Frozen food was the in-thing in the 70s with lots more households buying their first freezer. Mum had filled our freezer to the brim for Christmas as she liked to put on a feast over the festive period and we usually had various relations around. Unfortunately this particular Christmas morning, before we sat down excitedly to open our presents, Dad discovered a problem - the freezer had bust overnight.  

Of course, there was nothing that could be done to fix it and even Santa couldn't have done his magic that day and magically make a new freezer appear.  Mum didn't want any food thrown away so saved what she knew could be safely defrosted and used over the next few days. Croquette potatoes and chicken vol-au-vents for Christmas lunch was a new one for me, whilst fish fingers for supper was even stranger. But what to do with the rest of the food that we didn't want?  Well, since it was the time for giving, why not give our food away to the neighbours.

So off we went. Frozen prawns to Mr Fisher (how apt), frozen veg to Mrs Mitchell, a gateaux to number 30, Crispy Pancakes to another neighbour and various other 1970s delights to our delighted neighbours.  They thought Christmas had come - oh, wait, it had!  

Sadly for our neighbours, our freezer never broke down again at Christmas but the tale has been remembered for many years.

I must remember to check the freezer on Christmas morning.