Happy for the Holidays

So this year I didn't get ornaments on the Christmas tree until yesterday. That's right. Oh, the tree had been up for a couple of weeks, but first we had to let the not-really-a-kitten-but-still-acts-like-one get her ya-yas out by trying to climb the thing a few times, and then wrap up the last week of school and school parties and baking and gifts for teachers and random things like a long-overdue toilet repair and excavating Son #1's room and...

 Our cat wishes she could do this.

Is it any wonder that people hate the holidays? I saw the first encroaching signs of the approaching holidays when the back wall of the seasonal section of our local Target filled up with Christmas lights a week before Halloween. I admit it made me cranky, because instead of a wall of lights I saw a long unspooling to-do list, full of Hanukkah parties and Christmas events (yes, our family celebrates both). I saw high expectations and disappointed hopes in my future, because those things always seem to go hand in hand. The pressure to make things magical for the holidays, especially when you have kids, seems overwhelming. But life doesn't stop for you to suddenly become Betty Crocker and churn out twelve dozen perfectly decorated sugar cookies to give to the neighbors, or to spend hours untangling strings of lights to find enough that work to decorate the tree. Hell, for me it's an accomplishment to have enough Hanukkah candles in the house.

This year a couple we're friends with stopped by and dropped off a container of cookies, along with their holiday card. I experienced a moment of panic, even as I smiled, thanked the husband, and waved to the wife, who was sitting in their car at the curb. I hadn't thought of baking for any of our friends, even though a week previously I had made roughly five squintillion sugar cookies and pizzelles for Son #2 and Son #3's holiday class parties, to give to the school office, and to send to Son #1's teachers. I mentally started calculating the time it would take to make some more sugar cookie dough, and whether or not I had enough colored sugar to decorate another several dozen cookies, and then...I let it go. This is not going to be the year that I am the Woman Who Does Everything More Beautifully Than You (and who likes that b*tch anyway?). Next year probably won't be it either.

There are no lights on the outside of our house. I haven't sent out our cards yet because they are New Year's cards (much easier than sending Hanukkah cards to some family and Christmas cards to the rest), and the best present we got from my husband's family was the moratorium on gifts between adults. Last year I spent the Saturday before Christmas in the mall, in a weird mental zen state of completely embracing the suck, knowing that I was elbowing my way through crowds to shop (two of my least favorite things combined, yay) because I had not managed to get it together to complete my shopping earlier online. This year the patron saint of our holidays has been Amazon.com. And my husband and I severely restricted our budgets for each other's gifts in favor of the much more practical gift of finally having our living room and dining room painted (a task that will take place AFTER the holidays are a memory).

I don't think the kids will notice that there are no elves on our shelves. We didn't spend three hours in stop-and-go traffic to drive past someone else's Christmas lights, and we didn't stand in a line of grumpy adults and fidgety children so that they could tell a man in costume their wish list. Sorry if that seems "bah humbug"y, but I look back at my own childhood and these things don't stand out to me. Tellingly, my kids haven't asked to do either. Maybe they are wise enough to know that either outing would come with a heaping helping of cranky mama.

This would be me after two hours in line.

The boys seem plenty happy with the endless supply of cookies and the lazy days of winter break when they can be in pajamas an hour past when they would normally be in school. Son #2 will spend this evening, I know, glued to the Santa Tracker app on my iPhone, and Son #1 will probably be the lone voice of reason among the boys as we alternately threaten and cajole them into bed at a halfway decent hour. (The tradition at my parents' house is that no presents whatsoever are put under the tree until after the kids are in bed, which means that we adults have a vested interest in getting them to bed so we don't have to stay up until two a.m. ourselves.)

This year I'm listening to that voice of reason myself. The breakable ornaments are staying put away for their own good, to survive to a year when adolescent feline curiosity has ebbed. The hours I spent coaching Son #1 to recycle most of the mountain of papers covering his desk were much better spent than if I had taken that time putting out myriad holiday decorations that would just have to be taken down again. Tonight I will enjoy a glass of wine with my family, and tomorrow I will enjoy being pried out of bed by my boys, who will not have any idea how I can possibly still be asleep when there are presents under the tree at Grandma and Granddad's! (Okay, maybe enjoy is a strong word on that last one, but I'll be good to go once you get some coffee in me.)

I hope that you have spent your holiday season doing what brings you and your loved ones joy. I hope that you have let go of unrealistic expectations for making the season perfect and that instead you can enjoy what is put before you. (I, for one, am looking forward to another exciting edition of "Seriously, People Really Think That's Okay to Wear to Church on Christmas Eve?" later today.) Laughter, hugs, family, friends, love, good food...and gratitude for everything I have. There. I'm happy already and I haven't opened a single present.

Happy holidays to everyone.

Soft-hearted, Possibly Soft-headed

 The magic number where you go from cat owner to "crazy cat lady" is three. Specifically, when you get your third cat, even if it's a fluffy, meltingly adorable kitten, people stop cooing over how cute it is and start asking pointed questions about how many more cats you intend to get. I know this, because my husband and I passed this point in 1997. Even though our official number of cats stopped at four the following year, we've never quite shed the stigma of being crazy cat folk.

This is where the trouble starts.

The problem is that I have a soft heart. Our first cat was a fairly traditional adoption--my husband found an online ad at the Mac users' group he was a member of at the time for "fuzzy logic," and we ended up with a beautiful free grey tabby kitten, Molly, who had a soul of more-or-less pure evil. (She is now seventeen, and she is basically too lazy to take a swing at you. She still thinks about it, though.) Our second cat, though, became ours so gradually that we hesitated to claim to own him for quite a while.

One day we became aware of a cat hanging out in the parking lot of our six-unit apartment building, crying. I went out to take a look, but the orange tabby skittered out of arm's reach when I tried to approach him. I decided to put out a bowl of food by our apartment door for him, but he wouldn't follow me there. Finally, I caught up to him as he jumped up on the fence that separated our building's driveway from the lot of the much larger apartment building next door, and carried him over to the food dish. He meekly submitted, but refused to eat until I stepped inside and shut the door.

Over the next several weeks he gradually acclimated to us: he would eat outside when our apartment door was open, then he would eat just inside the open apartment door. We managed to shut him in one day so we could take him to the shot clinic, where the vet told us that he had previously been fixed. So clearly he had been someone's pet before, we just didn't know whose. We even got him a collar listing our names and number, and I waited for several weeks to get a call from a stranger demanding to know why we had put a collar on his cat. No call came.

The turning point came when Orange (as we finally came to call him, after so long referring to him only as "the orange cat") disappeared overnight one Saturday. We found him the next day in the parking lot, howling, and with his tail drooping unnaturally. We took him to the emergency vet, who gave us the bad news that his tail was broken in two places (he speculated that it had been run over by a car), and the good news that since he was only going to charge us the regular exam fee (instead of the double-on-Sunday usual fee) because he couldn't do a darn thing about it. We took Orange home and kept him in for several days while he began to heal, and after that he was really our kitty, in his own mind as well as ours.

The third cat, the one that pushed us over the edge to crazy, was actually my husband's fault. He went to the pet food store to get a lid that would fit a can of cat food, and came running home to tell me about the kittens they had up for adoption. Lying in bed with a headache, I looked at him skeptically. "We're just going to look!" he insisted. It turned out that he had put his hand inside the cage of kittens, and one had immediately jumped into it. That was it. We went to the store to "look" and came home with cat #3, Minnie. After that, it didn't seem like much of a big deal when cat #4, Jane, sucked up to me at a similar cat adoption event a year and a half later. The line from responsible pet owners to crazy cat hoarders had already been crossed.

I guess the reason I'm thinking about all this right now is that we have just crossed another line--we officially became a five-cat household a couple of days ago. Both Jane and Orange passed away in recent years (at 11 and 16 years of age, respectively). In the meantime we also added two new cats, Toothless (a black cat named by the kids for the dragon in How to Train Your Dragon, and no, he's not toothless) and Boo (a pale grey tabby adopted as a feral kitten from the warehouse at my husband's job, and who after a year of domesticity is still pretty weird), largely to spare our elderly cats from the overenthusiastic affections of our children. We figured we'd wait for nature to take its course and gradually end up as a two-cat household, with Toothless and Boo to keep each other company. At no point did we exceed four cats at one time.

I look into the future and see a scratched toddler in 3, 2, 1...

And then a black cat started hanging out in our back yard. When I first saw her I panicked, thinking Toothless had gotten outside. But it turned out she was just a stray, one who then frequently came to the window to check out our indoor kitties. Of course, soft-hearted me started feeding her. And she started hanging out more. Lounging on our patio furniture. Meowing imperiously in the morning for her breakfast. Not to be outdone in the soft-heartedness department, my husband bought her a cat bed. And she whiled away the winter on a heating pad in said cat bed, refusing all offers to be let inside.

However, other neighborhood cats recently discovered that there was free food to be had at our place. The cat we had started calling Extra (as in "our extra cat") began to hide as aggressive newcomers tried to muscle her out. And last week a raccoon paid a visit to the buffet. He began to amble towards our back patio while I was still outside, and I jumped inside, only to dart out again a moment later to snatch up a startled Extra and bring her inside with me. We stared out at the raccoon and he stared right back as he picked every stray bit of cat food out of the nearly-empty bowl. Then he left, but I kept Extra inside for another half-hour, just to be safe, despite her impatient protests.

Is it a coincidence that a day later she came in on her own for the first time? Even a cat can appreciate the value of air conditioning on a brutally hot day (especially a cat with black fur). Since then she's been in and out, but mostly in. This confirms my long-standing hunch that she was a stray and not a true feral cat. The rest of our cats, having long had a sniffing acquaintance with Extra through the screen door, seem to have accepted her with a minimum of histrionics (though there was some pro forma hissing and growling, just to establish that she is low cat on the totem pole).

So I guess I'll just have to own it--I'm a crazy cat lady in a crazy cat family. I'm already used to the reaction I get when people ask how many cats I have--they invariably repeat, "Four?" in wide-eyed disbelief, as if to say, "And here I thought you were sane all this time!" Only now they'll get to say "five." Welcome aboard, Extra. I may be crazy but I keep the food bowl full.

Not our future...I hope.

Next blog post we'll be back to The Adventures of Jen in the Pit of Despair, or Humility Lessons, Garage Style.