"The first Christmas that my husband and I were married was a bitter 9 degrees, uncommonly frosty for our part of the South, even for December. We knew that our 1930s was poorly insulated—we had purchased insulation the previous week to eventually install and hadn't anticipated the cold snap.
"Upon arising on Christmas morning, we found that, despite the fact that our furnace was constantly running, it was nearly as bitterly cold inside our house as it was outside! Our feet burned when we walked barefoot on the wood floors! As if that wasn't bad enough, we also quickly discovered that our pipes had frozen and burst, and that we had 5-foot-long icicles hanging.
"Needless to say, opening Christmas presents was the last thing on our list of things to do that morning. We spent that entire Christmas Day putting insulation beneath our floors and in the attic and thawing and repairing the frozen pipes. The best present we got that year was when our house's interior temperature finally reached 60 degrees... 48 hours later."
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