CAT ASS STREAMERS
"O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, your ornaments are history." Anonymous Feline
Christmas is less than a week away. I spent a good part of this afternoon wrapping gifts - not very many - not like in the days when my son was a child and my family was whole. There were dozens then and it took days, not a couple of hours. I am feeling nostalgic for those days.
I love Christmas - the lights, the tree, the spirit of the season. and now snow. I never had a snowy Christmas growing up and living life in Los Angeles. It was always a fantasy, but now it is a reality and it makes me happy.
Remembering Christmases past also makes me happy, like the year I bought my sister and my very fashion-conscious mother giant, bright yellow, banana-shaped slippers as a gag, and they both immediately put them on and spent the entire day with stuffed bananas on their feet.
Today’s poem is about a couple of my family Christmas legends.
CAT ASS STREAMERS
Christmas was our monster holiday.
Every year it was the same - huge!
Every year we said the same thing,
”Let’s scale this thing down, let’s not spend so much,”
but no one listened. We just enjoyed it too much.
Every “Kodak moment” shows
piles of festively wrapped boxes
under a classic Christmas tree, and
you can almost smell the aroma of
roasting leg of lamb -
it was certain death if the menu ever changed.
I treasure every Christmas I got to share with friends and family,
especially as our number dwindled in later years.
I enjoy thumbing through the memories, but here’s the thing -
the Christmases I remember best are not the Hallmark moment holidays,
memorialized on film, but the aberrations emblazoned in my mind.
There was the year I dropped the leg of lamb
on its way into the oven, and quick as a flash,
my angelic Golden Retriever, Amber,
who never did anything wrong,
grabbed that sucker off the floor and
flew out her doggie door into the backyard,
lamb clenched between her teeth with me right on her tail,
which was wagging wildly, as I was loudly whispering
“No, Amber, drop it” and she played keep-away
until I finally cornered her and recovered her prize.
As we sat down to dine off Christmas china settings
around a table dressed with holly-sprigs and candle centerpiece,
I silently hoped that no one would guess
that their dinner had once been covered in dog spit
and recovered from a flower bed.
And then there was the year that my young son
thought it would be fun to switch the gift tags
on some packages and his very proper grandmother
wound up opening a Victoria’s Secret negligee
that my husband bought for me.
But I think the grand prize has to go to the year
when everyone was lolling around on sofas, or
lounging on the floor, full of roast lamb, with all the trimmings,
and a tasty piece of pumpkin. pie, sipping coffee, and
quietly chatting, enjoying the afterglow of opening gifts
surrounded by crumpled wrapping paper, tissue, and boxes,
when suddenly, without warning,
Mr. Kit, my usually shy lethargic 20 lb. black cat,
raced at breakneck speed through the room,
leaping over our legs, gifts, and detritus of paper,
running as though he’d been set on fire.
We were stunned into silence,
each thinking a version of “what the hell”
when he briefly paused to catch his breath
and the cat-race-catalyst revealed itself —
two feet of curling ribbon Scott-taped to his butt.
Before a single one of us could act, Mr. Kit was off again,
like a bullet, green streamers flying from his ass,
chasing him relentlessly, while he tried like crazy to escape.
[Note: No animals or children were harmed in the making of these memories.]
Glad we have memories since Christmas's are just not the same as we age.