Tree decorating with cats. O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, your ornaments are history!
~Courtney VanSickle
Quimby was picked up as an emaciated stray and eventually made his way into the shelter where we found him one hot July afternoon. By Christmas, he had fully assimilated into domestic life. As the sole pet in our home, the recipient of all snuggles, cuddles, and chin-scratches, I’m sure he thought life couldn’t get any better.
Then the Christmas tree came.
Per our usual tradition, I popped in our DVD of Christmas Vacation to get in the spirit. And as Clark Griswold wrestled in the wilderness to get the family tree, I hauled our own heavy boxed tree up from the basement.
As soon as the basement door opened, Quimby rocketed off the couch to investigate. The basement was strictly off limits to him, and on the rare occasion he managed to sneak in, he was immediately shooed back upstairs.
But this time, he dug in and refused to go away. I tried simply closing the basement door as I worked downstairs, but the curiosity was just too much for him to bear. He pressed his face against the bottom of the door and began yowling pitifully to me in the basement.
Well, I’m a big softie, so I thought that maybe if he watched what I was doing, he would calm down a bit.
That turned out to be an incorrect assumption.
I pulled box after box of Christmas décor out from our storage closet under the stairs. Tail flicking, Quimby’s excitement grew with each one.
He started by pawing the newspaper wrapping off the big wreath we used for the front door. Delighted to find a wiry evergreen shrub underneath, he latched onto one of the shiny, plastic presents glued onto the wreath and proceeded to start dragging the wreath back upstairs.
“Drop it!” I snapped at him from the bottom step. His bright green eyes dilated as if he’d just taken a whiff of catnip. “Drop. It.” I repeated. And he did — right after he yanked the sparkly present off the wreath, and shot off to go play with his prize.
Okay, I thought, one plastic present isn’t so bad in the grand scheme of things.
The respite lasted long enough for me to haul the rest of the boxes upstairs before Quimby came back for more.
I managed to get all three sections of the Christmas tree up and centered in the tree stand. I was able to fan out and rearrange the branches. I had just started stringing the lights when Quimby skidded under the tree, using the satin tree skirt as a slide. I would soon learn our hardwood floors were the perfect sledding venue. Quimby would get a running start, leap onto the tree skirt, and skid as far as the skirt would take him.
We had brought the outdoors to him in the form of a wonderfully colorful tree with lots of shiny baubles, and he couldn’t get enough of it.
Then he started taking ornaments off the tree. My husband and I would turn our heads or step away just long enough to come back and see the tree shaking, immediately followed by the unmistakable cadence of four little feet running down the hallway.
Following him, we’d invariably find him huddled in the middle of a guest bed. He would be curled up as tightly as possible, eyes huge, and his little nose tucked into his paws as he watched us enter the room. One of us would hold his shoulders while the other gently moved his paws away from his belly to discover what he’d taken. He loved snatching one ornament in particular: a silver pinecone covered with glitter. Quimby would steal it every time we put it back on the tree.
We had made peace with the fact that Quimby loved to slide under the tree, and aside from that one silver pinecone, he didn’t seem to be taking any other ornaments. But then, he started chewing on the tree. He would get a mouthful of fake pine and chomp away. Short of taking down the tree, we had to figure out a way to keep this cat out!
Quimby didn’t realize it, but he was about to help us create a new Christmas tradition.
We knew he would scale or squeeze through any gate we put up around the tree, so we had to come up with a more creative solution.
My husband laughed and said, “I think I’ve figured out something that might work.” A half-hour later, he returned from the local drugstore and held up a large pack of silver bells. He opened them and threaded them along the bottom branches of the tree.
“Watch this,” he whispered.
Nonchalantly, we walked away from the tree, pretending to ignore Quimby. Then, we watched him from the corner of our eyes as he quietly inched closer to the tree, before latching onto a low-hanging branch for an evening chew.
Then a handful of bells chimed.
Quimby froze. He tried again — only to be met by a mass tinkling of bells.
“Get out of that tree!” we both said in unison to him. It worked. He shot off.
He tried several times over the night to go back to the tree, but each time the bells rang, we scolded him to get out of the tree. Each time, he would take off like a rocket down the hallway. Thirty minutes would pass, and he’d try again — only to be foiled by ringing bells.
We’ve celebrated three Christmases with him since then, and each year it’s become a tradition to add more bells in various sizes. The entire bottom third of our tree is now nothing but a twinkling mass of silver bells.
Every year, as we sift through all the newspaper-wrapped ornaments and prepare them for hanging, we giggle when we come upon one of the sets of bells. And as each one is unwrapped, Quimby flops under the tree and huffs loudly in defeat, watching us thread the bells through the bottom branches.
True to tradition, Quimby still regularly tests the cat warning system and freezes immediately once the bells ring.
And every holiday season, we still grin when we hear a bell ring. It might be true that somewhere an angel just got her wings, but in our house every time a bell rings, the cat is back in the tree.
— Kristi Adams —
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