Tuesday, December 07, 2004

It's Almost Beginning To Kinda Look A Little Bit Like...


Thanks to some considerately-unannounced sewer work being done in the complex last Monday, I woke up that morning and found myself without any running water whatsoever -- never a great way to start the day. So, in order to make myself presentable to the record-buying public, I was forced to zip over to my parents' house for a pre-work shower. While washing up, I decided out of sheer curiosity to try out some of my brother's Old Spice body wash. I haven't worn any kind of cologne in years (I was once a big proponent of Fahrenheit and Drakkar), and I think that using this nice-smelling goop that morning awakened a bit of nostalgia for those days, because I decided to pick up some of my own the next time I stopped at Walgreen's.

Well, said "next time" turned out to be earlier this evening, and while I was wandering aimlessly about the densely-stocked aisles at Walgreen's, I came across their Christmas Decorations display. Now, despite Sarah and I both being pretty big on Christmas decorations, we hadn't put up any this year -- largely because of the Clown Prince Of Wanton Chaos that is Moe, the younger of our two cats.

Last Christmas was my first with a cat in the house, and Ghidorah (an otherwise perfectly-behaved angel of a pet) simply could not resist attempting to eat or subtly redecorate our Christmas tree on a near-daily basis (and we were finding stray ornaments under furniture for weeks after we took the tree down). Now, if even Ghidorah was unable to resist temptation with a Christmas tree, I reasoned with Sarah months ago, it's a near certainty that Moe will fancy himself the Sir Edmund Hillary of cats the instant I turn my back on him. Thus, in order to spare myself a lot of frustration and oh-my-God-I'm-gonna-fucking-kill-this-cat moments this holiday season, I decided that we'd skip on setting up and trimming a Christmas tree this year.

I don't think Sarah was ever happy with this course of inaction -- if anything, she is even more into the Christmas season than I am -- but I think she at least felt the same way I did in regards to waging a daily battle with Moe and gravity.

It wasn't until this past Sunday night when we were driving home from a visit to Mentor, that I started to have a change of heart. As Sarah drove us home, I found myself staring at nearly every house we passed, looking to see how many people had trees up and lit in their front windows, checking out the lights, and wishing there was a little bit of snow down to really make the drive "perfect." For the first time, I thought of us exchanging gifts on Christmas Eve with no tree or soft colored lights and started to feel a bit sad about it.

While walking up and down the Christmas aisle at Walgreen's 24 hours later, staring at the strands of lights, the wreaths, the holiday candies, the colored light bulbs, the ornaments, the holiday movies, and the aluminum icicle decorations (a favorite pet delicacy), I felt my resolve weakening a bit further. OK, I thought to myself after a few minutes of looking, we can get a couple of colored light bulbs for the front door fixture, maybe one for our neighbor Steve as well, and a couple of strands of green lights for the front bay window. We'll consider this a test -- if Moe leaves these alone, then maybe...just maybe...I'll consider putting up a tree this year.

With a bit of the old sentimental Yule cheer beginning to surge in me at last (when did I start getting like this about the holiday season? I can't recall ever being interested in this end of the deal when I was a teenager), I thumb-tacked up two new strands of green lights around the inside of the bay window shortly after I got home, then stuck a red lightbulb in the fixture outside. It's not exactly as spectacular as I'd hoped (particularly with the curtains closed), but it did raise my murky-foggy-miserable- early-December spirits a bit and I'm pretty sure it did for Sarah, too.

Ghidorah, true to character, didn't seem at all enthused with this intrusion into her favorite resting area (she spends hours in the bay window watching the world go by on a daily basis), while Moe was just bursting with his usual breakneck curiosity. In no time at all, Moe was batting tentatively at the lights, then sniffing them, and, finally, attempting to eat them. Sigh. Sarah then broke out our trusty bottle of Bitter Apple and spritzed away at all of the cords and lights in Moe's reach. After a subsequent attempt at light bulb ingestion a few minutes later, he appears to have figured out (for now) that hey, light strands actually taste terrible, man, blech uch agh, et cetera. Note -- I would have thought he'd learned the lesson of what happens when you chew on electrical cords earlier this fall when he apparently used up one of his nine lives chewing on a power cord behind the entertainment center...but that's Moe for you.

Now comes the waiting-and-seeing game. It's safe at this point to say that we win Round One. Round Two will be played out over the next few days, and we'll consider Round Three this weekend after doing a few more of our mandated home repairs. I'm still not at all certain that I want to risk a few hours of tree work on the possibility that maybe Dr. Destructo has finally learned a lesson. To help combat this dilemma, Sarah wants to look into buying a pre-lit Christmas tree. While I certainly don't relish the process of stringing lights onto our current fake tannenbaum, pre-lit trees are, in my experience, rather expensive for our finances right now. What makes this possibility at least worthy of a second look, however, is that there are apparently some cheaper models being made available (if we're lucky, these more affordable options don't look like utter ass cheese), so I'm at least open to the idea.

Whether or not this particular idea pans out, I'd like very much to add something to the bay window since it looks so damn empty to me right now. A Christmas tree (pre-lit or otherwise) would certainly do the trick of filling the empty space, but there are also a few other possibilities we can look into in case Moe decides to make a spirited battle out of Round Two. My bills will all be out the way tomorrow, so Sarah and I should be free and clear to take a look around a few places this Sunday and make our decoration decision at last. In the meantime, I'm quite sure Moe will be waiting...and scheming.

NP: Various Artists The Reindeer Room: Christmas Chillout Vol II

1 comment:

KeithHandy said...

The more I click on your links, the more I suspect you of being responsible for the illustrations in the Cliff Jones book.