Up and at 'Em

I woke up this morning to one of worst sounds that can disturb slumber: retching. It was about four in the morning, which tends to be when I sleep the lightest, and even in my sleep-hazy mind, I knew the sound of puking. It was a cat, not a child, which was better than it could have been, I suppose. On the other hand, my children are old enough to know to run to the bathroom or a trashcan if the urge to vomit seizes them. The cats do not know where to aim, and so, no matter where they heave, it’s as bad a spot as any.

So I was awakened at four in the morning. I recognized the sound, and I knew it was coming from somewhere in my bedroom. I had a couple of options. I could jump out of the bed, grab the heaving animal, and throw it in the tub or the hardwoods in the hallway, or I could turn on the lights and scare it enough to spew. I knew my husband would be even less pleased than I to wake up to the combination of cat puke and sudden overhead lighting. Plus, he is still upset the cats aren’t dogs.

I also knew that the longer I waited to make a decision, the less likely I would need to.  Also, the longer the heaving continued, the less familiar it sounded. I sat up and looked around the floor, but couldn’t see a dark figure hunched over on the floor in my line of vision. The damn cat was hiding under something.

I knew it wasn’t the usual puker. Every family has one member who is the puker, and in my house, it’s my cat, Yoko. She is almost all black and has long hair, not Persian long, but long enough to clog the drain that is her cat throat about once a month. I buy this disgusting smelling paste from the vet called Laxatone which is supposed to help her pass her hair balls, but she hates it even more than I do. There is blood loss every time I attempt to use it, and so I tend to conveniently forget until, say, she hacks up a hairball. She’s nine, so that makes roughly 108 hairball vomit episodes I’ve had to clean up over the course of her lifetime. It seems a small price to pay for the pleasure of her company.

The other cat, Moshe, is a short haired tuxedo with a vacant stare and a surprisingly docile personality. He also has the ability to eat like a billy goat and not throw up often, which adds to his overall charm. I don’t mean the eating part, because that’s annoying as shit, but generally speaking, he keeps down whatever he ingests. I was surprised to wake up to the sound of him heaving since, really, it is never him. Even when he gags he manages to keep it down. He would make a terrible bulimic.

What really sucks is that I totally understood why he was puking. Moshe has a serious problem with Christmas. While Yoko is content to sleep on the tree skirt in a modern Normal Rockwell kind of way, Moshe prefers to eat Christmas. He chews on the light cords. He eats ribbons off of presents. He snacks on fragrant potpourri. And he feasts on his favorite, ornaments.

Moshe has developed a rather strong fondness for ornaments. He likes the glittery thread from which they dangle. He is a fan of the soft batting filled Santas and snowmen. He especially likes sequins and beads, and he will even chew a bit on the wire hooks we use to hang the decorations. He has also discovered that the stronger branches on the lower part of the tree work well as a ladder to work his way higher up to the more delicate and special ornaments that we have learned to hang out of his reach. I kid you not; he has actually made a series of steps out of the branches, kind of like a spiral staircase. And at fifteen pounds, he is not able to nimbly float up the tree; I am fully expecting to find the whole thing on its side one morning because of him.

This year, he also discovered the hand crocheted garland that my older daughter made a few years ago. He has already chewed it into several pieces, which look lovely hanging around the tree, like clumps of intestine. He had to work hard at it, so there are many cat saliva thickened spots which add a special touch that says homemade. I doubt my daughter even remembers how to crochet anymore, so it’s not like she is going to make another one any time soon.

After some midnight snacking on the holiday décor, Moshe clearly needed some Pepto. And so instead of drinking a bunch of water and sitting up for a few hours, he heaved and hunched and puked on my bedroom floor, before I could find him. While everyone else was waking up to the sound of their alarms or the smell of breakfast cooking, I was on my knees in the dark with the Woolite pet stain remover and a wad of paper towels, crawling under the bed and looking under the chaise lounges until I found the three, yes, three places where he succeeded in clearing his digestive system.

Here’s my question: what do dogs do for Christmas? Do they eat ornaments off the tree? Do they try to climb it and knock it over? Do they find the cranberry cheesecake cooling on the counter and take delicate nibbles off the top? The truth is, I am a little scared there is going to be a puppy on Christmas morning, and I just need to know what I am in for. At least the presence of a puppy would scare the cats away from the tree and all its many delicacies.

I am going to add carpet cleaning to my Christmas list.

Oh, Christmas Tree

Do you have your Christmas tree up yet? I don’t know about you, but I hate putting up the Christmas tree. There is always a fight over it. That’s not the right corner. You’re not helping enough.  Don’t put the ornaments on like that, do it like this. Goddammit, the cat won’t stop eating the decorations. Seriously, it’s always something.

But no matter how much I hate putting up the tree, Christmas wouldn’t feel like Christmas without it. Fuck that elf on the shelf; a Christmas tree is what makes the holidays special. Hell, in my house we don’t even have a real tree. We have a better than real tree, with lead coated fake needles that shed just like the real thing to lend an air of authenticity. It’s over nine feet tall and pre-lit, which doesn’t stop my husband from stringing his favorite reproduction bubble lights. They are pretty cool, I have to admit.

I usually find an excuse to avoid decorating the tree. I offer to run errands, to make dinner, to fold the laundry, to massage the cats, anything it takes to get out of tree duty. That’s because when I was a kid, I was traumatized by Christmas trees, or maybe by my mother.

I should explain that my mother was never a big fan of Christmas. Possibly it reminded her that she didn’t have the money to buy everything we wanted. Maybe it was because she was supposed to give, not receive, which meant she couldn’t buy things for herself, things she also didn’t have enough money for.  Or it could have been that we were Jewish and shouldn’t have really been celebrating Christmas anyway. Whatever the reason, she was always more than a bit cray cray between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, and my sisters and I have had to find a way to make peace with the holiday season.

The symbol of my mother’s yearly holiday mental breakdown was the Christmas tree. We never managed to buy one until at most three days before Christmas, when all the good trees were gone. We had a choice of a crappy Douglas fir with a giant bald spot in the front or a Charlie Brown tree, never the nicer trees that were fresher and cost too much money. One year we actually stole a tree from an unattended tree lot, reasoning that by Christmas Eve, they should be giving trees away.  It never occurred to my mother that stealing might not have been the best way to celebrate the holiday season.

We would bring our sad tree home and my oldest sister, who operated as the family handyman, would have the daunting task of securing the tree in the stand. I would fill the basin with water, which I would forget to do the rest of the time it stood as a harbinger for the holiday. Then the fighting would begin, over colored vs. white lights, who got to put the angel on top, whether to break out the tinsel, fake snow, or pine scented air spray, who put the ugly ornaments in front, until the only thing left was lots of crying followed by the gift of silence. The tree would stand neglected for a week or two past the holiday until almost all the needles had fallen off, at which point someone, also not my mother, would put the decorations away and haul the fire hazard to the curb.

One particular year, my sisters and I decided to take control of the tree situation, sort of as a gift to my mother. Before she came home from work, we got the tree in the stand positioned in the corner of the front room. We took out all of the ornaments and lights and decorated the whole thing. My mother walked in as we were cleaning up, the boxes scattered around the room, vacuum standing guard to suck away the many stray needles. The room was perfectly silent; my sisters and I ceased the incessant bickering as we awaited my mother’s reaction.  She looked at us, and the tree, and said, “It’s in the wrong corner.” Then she turned around and walked back out the front door, and didn’t return for a few hours. She was wrong, though, it was in the right corner. She just forgot which corner we had it in the year before. She also forgot we were children, and that holidays were supposed to be for fun memories, not the other kind.

So now I let my family take charge of the tree. I tend to set up the Hanukah stuff, since we have a vast assortment of menorahs, none of which will hold a standard Hanukah candle. I will also carry boxes to and from the attic, hang the stockings, and even remove ornaments from their bubble wrap or tissue paper, but getting the ornaments on the tree is going too far from me. It’s like I’m waiting for my mother to come in and find fault with how I hung something, to complain I am not doing it right, to let me know that yet again I am the cause of her unhappiness.

 Once the tree is up, I sit back and admire it with my family. I love the Christmas tree. I love the fact that we have the oddest assortment of ornaments. I love the fact that my cat tries to eat his favorite ones year after year. I love that I give my daughters ornaments every year so that when they are ready for trees of their own, they will have a set to take with them into adulthood. I’m especially grateful that even if we all fight every time the tree goes up, they still look forward to the tree every Christmas, with its collection of owls, robots, ballerinas, and even snails. It is chock a block with things that each of us loves, and all together, it is a festive version of our family.