It's the day after Christmas, the house is a mess. The bills to pay for all the holiday glee will be arriving next week, and the plumber may be on his way.
The plumber?
A lot of people these days discover that Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without the aggravation of a clogged kitchen drain, a consequence of all that cooking, the strain on the garbage disposal.
Most of the plumbers asked about this in an informal telephone survey agreed: Christmas and Thanksgiving are unfriendly to the household sewerage.
Which means that at rates of $100 an hour or more for overtime, they can be profitable days for plumbers willing to plunge ahead when many of their pals are enjoying the amenities of the season.
James ("just like the movie actor") Dean, boss of the Friendly Cobra Sewer Co. of Brooklyn Park, recalled that he spent two successive Christmases at a customer's house some time back.
"We were joking around," he recalled, "and the customer said, 'Well, I guess I'll see you next Christmas.' Sure enough, next Christmas he needed me out there again." Jim Scardina, the head of Scardina's of Glen Burnie, said he always assigns extra workers the day after Christmas to meet demand.
For Robin Bryan Culver, owner of Walter H. Bryan Plumbing Inc., it's that other holiday she finds the busiest. "The day after Thanksgiving we're really busy with clogged garbage disposals. Celery's the main reason. From the turkey stuffing. It's got those long strands. They get wrapped up in the disposal."
How widespread is the problem? National plumbers associations don't track it. Diane Kastner, head of the Maryland chapter of the National Association of Plumbing Contractors, is uncertain. She did say plumbers are more likely to be in your house during the holidays, but on maintenance rather than rescue missions.
"Women like to have their sinks and disposals in good shape for the holidays," she said.
No one can predict for certain what will cram pipes and flush holidays down the metaphorical toilet. This year Jim Singleton of John C. Flood plumbers in Towson encountered an agent new to his experience.
"We got a call just before Thanksgiving to clear a drain in the Annapolis area," he said. "The entire house was backed up. Water was running on the floor everywhere."
Off goes trouble-shooter Tim Grimes.
"Our man goes in and runs the electric snake and comes out with pumpkin seeds. That's right, pumpkin seeds! Thousands of them. The people were making pies."
But neither pumpkin seeds nor celery is the inevitable gremlin in the machine. Nor is the big bird itself, when globs of its grease, slopped down the drain, decline to move on. Clogged drains are a side-effect of the season's impulse to invite relatives and friends to the feast.
"Some people have 10 or 15 people over, and they're dumping more than usual down the drain," Mr. Scardina said.
"It's not deliberate," said Fred Dermer, of Farnen and Dermer plumbing.
"Around the holidays when people are cooking they're preoccupied with that and not thinking about what they're putting down there."
This confirms the judgment of Roscoe "Rocky" DeLauder, retired now after 50 years service with Francis C. Dorsey Inc. Said the Rock: "The big problem is all them strangers in the kitchen."
How do people greet the plumber who arrives to save the day, or what's left of it? "They're tickled pink" with gratitude, he said.
Sometimes that can manifest itself in unexpected ways. After a plumber saved his frozen pipes last holiday season, Baltimore artist Raoul Middleman conceived the idea for a painting called "The Plumber." But the plan was undone by the subject's hectic schedule.
"I was going to put the plumber in this picture, but didn't because the plumber was busy," he said.
Instead Mr. Middleman organized the picture differently. An artist and his models are looking outward at someone who has just entered the studio, the unseen plumber.
The picture hangs in the current exhibit at Maryland Art Place on Saratoga Street.