How George the Cat Wrecked Christmas

by David Benjamin

 

George was accident prone.

For example, the first time he met Jody’s mother, he boldly leapt into her lap. She was drinking tea at the time, but she only spilled a few drops because George, despite his tendency toward minor, forgivable mishaps, had a knack for soft landings. 

Jody’s Mom, who was known to friends, family and officialdom as June Noel, however, was sorely surprised. She didn’t expect an encounter with a strange cat. Indeed, in more than one respect, George was a strange cat. Mom had never seen this black-backed, white-bottom, pink-nosed creature before. He didn’t belong. As far as she knew, he had no name. She had no idea where he came from or how he got into the house. She could only guess that he had climbed the ridge from one of the bungalows nestled among the pines along the lake below. 

Mom said “eek” softly when the cat landed. She didn’t stand, lest she spill tea on her sweater, a cherished family heirloom. The garment had been knitted of midnight-blue yarn by Mom’s grandmother in the last few months of her long life. Of all Mom’s keepsakes, the sweater was her most precious because, when she wore it, she felt as though she had snuggled into Nana’s arms. 

This is why Mom was alarmed when George, while luxuriantly stretching his long, lithe body across her startled lap, caught a claw in one strand of Nana’s sweater. Mom dropped her teacup and cried out in distress. 

It was George’s turn to be sorely surprised. 

Now, of course, any attempt to read the mind of cat is unwise, and inevitably fruitless. However, measured by George’s reaction, it seems likely that he expected to be welcome in any lap he chose to grace with his presence. Hence, when Mom greeted George’s condescension with the crash of china on the floor, hot tea sprinkling his fur and a squeal of alarm, George had ample reason to panic and flee.

Flight, alas, posed difficulties. George’s right front paw refused to unhook from the discourteous human’s fuzzy garment. George couldn’t turn around. He looked up to Mom’s face, but perceived no empathy. It was red and growing redder. Her eyes bulged out unattractively. Her mouth, full of teeth, kept repeating, louder and louder, one word: “No, no, no, NO!” Instinct told George to escape. This imperative left him no choice but to back up, hurriedly, as fast as his hind legs and one free front leg could carry him. His other paw remained stubbornly connected to the raving biped’s lumpy sweater. 

Fortunately for George, even as he tried to run awkwardly backward, the garment—to which his errant claw continued to cling—stretched. As George pulled away, the sturdy strand of midnight blue wool grew longer and longer … two feet, then three.

Mom watched in horror. This cat, yanking and tugging a loop of yarn from her sweater, was threatening to unravel the last beloved product of Nana’s ancient, blue-veined, arthritic fingers. Mom had no choice. To keep this intruder from stretching her sweater, by a single thread, to a point beyond repair, she had to lunge from her chair and follow the cat like a dog on a leash. 

But she couldn’t simply follow the panicky, backscrabbling cat to wherever it wanted to go. She had to stop the cat. She had to seize the feline fiend, hold it down and unhook its talon from her keepsake.  

When George saw that the woman had left her feet, in what he could only interpret as a flying tackle aimed at him, he redoubled his backward scramble. His trapped claw twisted and turned but would not let go the tenacious strand. George’s blind retreat stopped suddenly when his rear parts thumped into a solid object—one of the end tables near the family fireplace. George was trapped. The woman might have crushed him, if not for the end table, which she struck with her face. The impact caused her to lurch sideways, delivering a mere glancing blow to the cowering cat. 

Mom dropped to the floor, dizzied by the blow to the bridge of her nose and gasping with pain. On the bright side, her sweater went slack The strand of yarn fell limp, and George regained his claw. He wasted no time savoring his liberation, He found his feet, skittered a moment on the hardwood floor and lit out, up the ladder and out through the gap from whence he had come into the house.

 Jody’s sister, Gabrielle—known informally as Gaby—had heard the ruckus faintly from her back bedroom. She found her mother prostrate on the floor, bleeding from a crease between her eyes and woozily struggling to tuck a yard of yarn back into the bodice of Nana’s woolen masterpiece.

After that incident, relations between Mom and George remained irredeemably cool. Nothing Jody said or did on George’s behalf had any effect. Although Jody made an excellent case that the entire episode had been an accident, Mom wasn’t swayed. 

The champagne incident 

Matters worsened that year on Thanksgiving. The Noels were hosting a feast for colleagues of Jody’s dad, Carl, who worked as an architect in the big city, forty miles away. In preparation for the guests’ arrival, Mom had carefully washed twelve crystal champagne flutes, setting them along the length of the breakfast bar that marked the border of the kitchen. 

The kitchen was broad and equipped with every appliance necessary to gourmet cookery. Stretched across the back wall were a double-oven and gas range, microwave oven, a great silver refrigerator, a butcher block and a long counter punctuated by a toaster, blender, a rice-cooker and other culinary gadgets. Cabinets were above. Jody’s dad, who had designed the house, had situated an island in mid-kitchen, with a double sink and more counter space. Beneath were the dishwasher and cabinets. Above the kitchen was a mezzanine, accessed by a sturdy oak ladder. This was Jody’s room. 

Jody slept on a mattress laid on a frame a few inches off the floor and tucked toward one of the mezzanine’s slanting walls. In the middle of his room, Jody could stand up straight with more than a foot of headroom. But the closer he got to either wall, the more he had to crouch. If he woke up on the wrong side of the bed, he was prone to bang his head. So, he was always careful about which way to roll in the morning, especially in winter when there was no sunshine through his skylight. 

It was the skylight that had served as George’s portal. Because heat rises, Jody’s mezzanine tended to be the warmest room in the house. To cool his face and waft him with fresh air, Jody kept the skylight open at least a few inches, even on winter days. For Jody, this pane set into the sharp slant of the roof was his window on the universe. Framed by the skylights, the stars were countless brilliant holes in a black dome. From night to night, he could follow the quarters and course of the moon. When a full moon inched into his square of sky, the light was bright enough to read by. On moonless nights, Jody was enveloped in a blue-gray aura, tinged with fear, that he could almost feel on his skin. He would pull his blankets up to his nose and fall asleep among harmless hauntings. One morning in early autumn, on one of those ghostly nights without moonlight, Jody woke to the feel of felt footsteps, small paws crossing his body.

Jody’s first thought was of a giant rat. The woods were full of squirrels and curious raccoons, but Jody thought of rats because of a movie scene that had stuck in his mind for months. This memorable episode took place in an underground tunnel lined with rotting dead bodies and skeletons draped with spiderwebs, where a million rats were crawling all over Indiana Jones and a waxy-faced blonde who later turned out to be a Nazi, and then ended up dead from falling through a crevasse in another tunnel. Awakened by footsteps and haunted by vermin, skulls and Nazi blondes, Jody came terribly awake, feeling as though he was in a spider-infested sewer where rats trampled his blankets.

This moment of terror lasted as long as it took Jody’s eyes to adjust to the dark and he could see the white parts of George’s fur and the white muzzle beneath his black burglar’s eyemask. “Oh, it’s a cat,” said Jody. softly. “Hi, cat.” George then immediately came over to Jody and rubbed his head against the boy’s face. Jody responded by deciding that the cat’s name was George.

For a while, no one else in the family knew about George. 

Rather like Indiana Jones, George was an explorer, and he was thorough. After his typically soft landing on the bed and making Jody’s acquaintance, George commenced an exhaustive examination of Jody’s mezzanine. When he returned a few nights later, he repeated the search, as though had never set foot in the room before. This exploration was clearly tiring, because George would then join Jody in bed, snugging his face against Jody’s cheek and dozing for a while, working up a powerful purr. 

Then, boing! Up to the skylight in a single bound, and gone.

The sweater incident, as it came to be known, was George’s first foray down Jody’s ladder and into the “main” house. Of course, it wasn’t his last. But George maintained no discernible schedule. For a while, he would drop in every day—even twice—but then go a week without visiting. There were times when George was so furtive and silent that no one, not even Jody, knew that the transient cat had come and gone. Only later would evidence emerge. A lampshade might be slightly askew, a throw rug rumpled, a hairball upchucked onto the seat of a chair, and a remark tinged with exasperation. “Hm, looks like George was here.”

Anyone in the family could have checked with Dozer, the plod-footed, good-natured English sheepdog who had been Jody’s Christmas puppy when he was five years old. Dozer could sniff out fresh cat-scent as soon as George slipped through the skylight. If so inclined, the dog could show the family exactly where George was hiding or creeping, sleeping or puking. But Dozer was a laissez faire sort of mutt. He had no strong feelings about cats, he was loath to be seen as a tattletale, and he only barked in a dire emergency, such as when his dinner was late. 

Dozer’s misgivings about George only developed after what came to be known as the champagne incident. This title is something of a misnomer because there was no actual champagne involved. 

Nor could there have been, after George leapt, with catlike grace, onto the shiny tile breakfast bar where a dozen crystal flutes waited for Dad to uncork a bottle or two of Laurent-Perrier and fill them. It was the popping of the first bottle that surprised George. The sudden noise sent him scurrying along the breakfast bar, nudging all in a row—as he ran—the exquisite cut-glass vessels just enough to set them spinning in a lovely, widening spiral until each lost its balance. 

Dozer, who had been napping beneath the breakfast bar, was rattled into wakefulness by the crash of one champagne flute inches from his tender nose, and then another champagne flute, and another, and seven, eight, nine—holy Saint Bernard!—how many more? Dozer found himself sprinkled and bewildered by a shower of exploding flutes and surrounded by glistening shards of shattered crystal. His confusion only grew when the roar of his master and the soprano shriek of his mistress followed the tempest. 

Dozer was not so dumbfounded, however, that he didn’t notice the black and white blur of the burglar cat as it climbed the ladder to the mezzanine in two Olympian leaps and vanished.

“Wow,” said Jody, staring at a jagged expanse of broken Baccarat. 

Holding the bottle, which had overflowed and soaked his sleeve, Dad said, “That goddamn cat. Where’d it come from?”

Mom, tears on her cheeks, replied, “Hell.”

Gaby had a theory, which she unspooled during that Thanksgiving dinner. George, she had deduced, was a French cat. 

“French?” asked Mom.

“Why French?” asked one of the guests, who was drinking champagne from a Dixie Cup.

“Oh, well, you have to listen to him,” said Gaby, who was in her first year of middle-school French. “He doesn’t say, ‘Meow,’ in English. He says, ‘Miaou.’”

This quieted everyone but Jody, who said. “That’s the same.”

Gaby shook her head piteously. “Jody, you doofus, it’s not the same. You have no ear for la belle française.”

Jody sneered at his big sister. “But George does?”

“In French, his name is Georges—with an ’s’.”

Mom broke in. “Gaby, his name isn’t George or Georg-es. We don’t know his name. He’s not our cat.” Then she added, “Damn it,” and blushed.

Gaby, however, stuck to her theory, pointing out that the occupants of the nearest bungalow down the ridge and beside the lake, were two young French women named Sylvie and Alienor. She had met them once. 

“They’re really nice,” said Gaby. “Besides, Georges must be theirs, ’cause the other bungalows were all closed for the winter. 

“Well, why didn’t they close down, too? And go away?” asked Dad.

“Because they love the winter, Daddy. They’re … um … sportive!” said Gaby. “They ski, they skate, they snowshoe … ” 

“Yeah, well,” asked Jody, “do they have a cat? Did you see them with a cat?”

“Well, no,” said Gaby. “But I can tell. Georges is French.”

“Well, French or not,” said Mom, “as soon as I get my hands on the little pest, I’m going to crate him up, ship him to Paris and tell him ‘Bon voyage!’”

“Oh, Mom, no!” cried Gaby.

“Gaby’s right,” said Dad. “That’s too much work. It’s easier to just pitch him off the deck.”

Now, it’s true that cats always land on their feet. However, tossed from the Noel family’s deck, George might not survive the flight regardless of where he pointed his feet. Jody’s Dad had built his dream house into a hill that overlooked a steep gorge. A rocky incline stretched downward a hundred yards, below which a dense forest of pine and oak concealed a stream that was only visible fleetingly on days when it reflected the noonday sun. If flung far enough out from the deck that overhung that precipitous valley, George would plummet a hundred feet before touching down and tumbling down a treeless jumble of granite and gravel. 

“Oh, Daddy,” cried Gaby.

Jody didn’t join the argument. He knew that his parents didn’t have the heart to kill any living thing. His mother had once rescued a yellowjacket from drowning in a glass of iced tea at a picnic. She blew on it gently until its wings dried and it was able to fly away.

That Thanksgiving night, unrepentant, George slipped into Jody’s bed and purred a feline lullaby. 

The shower curtain incident

Jody’s Dad preferred to maintain the impression that he stood aloof—and above the fray—in most domestic tussles. He was, after all, the breadwinner. He strove to preserve a certain air of dignity. In the ongoing controversy over George, therefore, Dad expressed his neutrality by repeating, tediously, the platitude, “Cats will be cats.”

This would draw from his daughter a juicy razzberry, which Dad paternally overlooked. 

He was able to cling to this pose until what became known as the shower curtain incident. 

The Noel dream house had two bathrooms. The large main bathroom was set into the hillside, between the master bedroom and Gaby’s smaller, cozier boudoir. Dad had a separate bathroom in the cellar, a space only large enough for a modest office and “man cave.” Dad had installed a desk, a drawing board, a few bookshelves, television and a billiard table. Family members were discouraged from entering Dad’s domain. But they were not forbidden, nor was the door to the cellar staircase ever locked. Often it stood open, allowing access to, for example, any curious cat who happened to pass by and notice how dark and inviting was this opening to an unexplored netherworld.

And so it came to pass one night, perhaps a week after Thanksgiving, that Mom had undertaken a lengthy occupation of the upstairs bath, coloring her hair. At the same time, Dad wanted to take a shower.

“No problem, honey,” said Dad. “I’ll go downstairs.”

Downstairs, in his “private” bath, Dad was in store for a shock, which did not occur ’til he had stripped down to his briefs and reached inside the shower curtain to turn on the hot water. 

One of the peculiarities of certain cats is the pleasure they derive from curling up and sleeping on a cool, smooth stretch of porcelain, the sort of unnatural surface that’s rarely available except, of course, in a bathtub. George happened to be one such porcelain-prone cat. Weeks before, on his exploration of the cellar, George had reconnoitered Dad’s bathroom, discovered the irresistible tub and had enjoyed several sensual and undisturbed catnaps there. George was, in fact, indulging himself in another forty winks in the tub when Dad reached in and turned the spigot.

Cats, as any catlover can attest, hate getting wet. Water suddenly encountered turns the tranquilest tabby into an airborne banshee. So, when the first cold gush hit George and woke him from a mousedream slumber, he was as though lightning-struck. To escape the flood, he flung himself upward as high and as fast as he could fly. This bound threw him violently into the shower curtain, a plastic drape adorned with a pattern of bright-hued polka dots. 

Stepping innocently away from the faucet, Dad did not expect his shower curtain to move or make noise. It had never done so in the past. This time, it uttered a piercing wail that was half-shriek and part growl. And it came at him, suddenly and violently, bulging outward, striking his naked shoulder and—although this seemed incongruous—sinking its claws into his skin. 

In reflexive self-defense, Dad tried to fend off the attack of the rampant shower curtain, clutching at it and raising a fist to fight it off. Before he could land a blow, one of the rungs holding the shower to the rail gave way, then another. Dad felt himself tipping backward. He tried to stay upright by grabbing hold of the curtain, a foolish move that only guaranteed Dad would tumble to the floor, which he did, with the smack of bare skin on cold tile. While Dad struggled in the clinging grip of the plastic shroud and began to cry out for help, the seemingly possessed curtain continued to writhe and claw at him, its voice a constant, ululating falsetto snarl. 

Raked and punctured by the monster from the bathtub, Dad contrived to creep toward the door, pulling himself partly out of the shower curtain’s death grip. Just as his head emerged and he was able to breath, he felt feet pounding for barely a second along his back and saw, in the corner of his vision, an unmistakable black and white streak emerge from the bathroom, skid on the floor and vanish up the steps. 

Dad remained where he was, breathing heavily, picturing the ravenous clawed monsters in Aliens, the giant cockroach of Men in Black, the mutant bathtub slugs in Slither. When he saw two feet in from of him, he recoiled in terror.

“Dad,” said Jody. “What are you doing on the floor? And why are you wearing the shower curtain?”

It took a moment for Dad to find his voice and utter the syllable that explained it all.

“George.”

The paper bag incident

Over breakfast the next day, everyone, even Dad, agreed that the shower curtain incident was hardly George’s fault. It was natural, after all, for cats to lounge around in enameled dissipation. Cats, after all, will be cats. And how was George to know that Dad was out there, on the other side of the curtain, turning on the water? And how was George to react, other than in a state of frantic feline hysteria? Besides, all of Dad’s wounds were so superficial that he didn’t even need the dozen-odd Band-Aids suggested by Mom, just a few dabs of mercurochrome on the worst traces of George.  

Dad even conceded that holding a grudge against George was beneath his dignity. Still, Dad’s equability toward the surreptitious cat was shaken. He occasionally entertained thoughts of how he might be able to cat-proof his dream house, just in case.

Then, he would stop and reproach himself for entertaining exaggerated anxieties. “Just in case what?” he would ask himself. “It’s only a cat.”

However, the mishap that came to be known as the paper bag incident suggested an answer to Dad’s “just in case” quandary. It definitely proved a wake-up call for Dozer. 

The mishap probably would not have happened if the Noel family had not revived their tradition of marking Mom’s birthday by gathering ’round a blazing fire and toasting the beginning of the Christmas season with hot, spiced apple cider. This took place in one of the front corners of the house, where Dad had designed a family den, with a semicircle of easy chairs and end tables that faced the fireplace. In the middle of this oasis was a broad table, close to the floor, where the family often set out food, played games or worked on jigsaw puzzles. On this occasion, however, according to tradition, the table featured Mom’s birthday gift from her loving husband, two dozen red roses, surrounded by baby’s breath and fern fronds, in a blue butterfly cloisonné vase. As usual, the party was grand, with more presents for Mom, cake and ice cream and Christmas music on Dad’s surround-sound stereo system. 

The morning after the party, George entered the quiet house. He was in safari mode, hunting for fresh stimuli. George was a cat who, above all, could not stand to be bored. In his every waking moment, he kept out an eagle eye for anything even slightly out of the ordinary.

And there it was! The Noels were neat, middle-class people and Mom was a fastidious housekeeper. But, as Bob Cratchit might phrase it, they had been “making rather merry” the night before. Proof of this lapse in discipline were several cider cups left unwashed on the breakfast bar and, lying on the floor of the house’s central atrium, a paper bag. Its mouth was open and from its dark interior wafted the vague redolence of mulling spices. 

Cats have no willpower against empty boxes and open bags. There was certainly a time in prehistory when Cenozoic cats, prowling for prey, saw a dark hole in the earth or the hollow in a tree and entertained visions of juicy marmots and delectable chipmunks. So, there they went. This urge to plumb the darkness is an instinct that has never perished, which meant that George could not help himself in the presence of the gaping sack on the floor in the atrium. 

So, there he went. George burrowed all the way into the dark recess, and then even further. There was, to his amusement followed by dismay, a hole in what should have the bottom of the bag. So, as he squirmed through, he found himself suddenly popping out into the light.

But not quite. 

George managed to push his head and front feet through the hole. That was all. The rest of George stayed in the bag. His front feet managed some traction on the polished floor but they could not pull him free from the bag. His hind legs churned busily, then frantically against the smooth paper surface, but took him nowhere. George was puzzled. He paused a while in uffish thought. He looked around for a helpful human. The children had gone to school. Dad and Mom were working somewhere. His only companion, Dozer the dog, was not only useless. He was nowhere to be seen.

Dozer, however, was roused by the noises George made while scrabbling on the smooth hardwood floor and struggling to break free of the clinging bag. So, Dozer, curious as a cat, emerged from hiding and clicked over to George. As is the wont of virtually every dog, his first gesture toward any puzzling situation was to sniff. He extended his muzzle toward George.

Normally, George maintained a diffident truce with Dozer, a languid beast. But George, half-immobilized, was in no mood for canine inquisitiveness. And both his front paws were operative. So, bracing himself on his left paw, he swung the other, talons extended, toward that intrusive nose. 

Raked across his most delicate organ, Dozer yelped and leapt backward. Sensing his advantage, George scrabbled two-footed but swiftly toward Dozer, forcing him backward. 

Dozer, of course, had no idea where he was going. His nose was bleeding and this scissor-handed feline, clawing his way across the floor like a deranged hermit crab, seemed determined to rip it right off his face. So, Dozer kept backing away. His tail led him toward the circle of chairs ranged around the fireplace. Driven by terror and propelled by the substantial muscles in his haunches, Dozer rammed through a narrow gap between a chair and a table, on which stood a lamp, which toppled to the floor, smashing its lightbulb with an alarming pop. 

The noise increased Dozer’s panic and, inexplicably, redoubled George’s two-legged attack. Dozer spun desperately on his his heels and bounded blindly away from the crawling, hissing cat. The family’s game table—and a cloisonné vase—blocked Dozer’s escape. Halfway across the table, he flopped onto its surface and slid toward the fireplace. His lacerated nose hit the floor as the beautiful Chinese amphora—top heavy with roses, fronds and baby’s breath—teetered once, then twice, then tipped over, smashing decisively and covering the startled Dozer in a rush of cold water. 

Soaked, shocked and terrified, Dozer found enough of his feet to plant one or two on the floor and and another somewhere atop the suddenly wet-slippery table and lunged …

… into the fireplace. Suddenly, Dozer was wallowing in a bed of warm ashes and surrounded by brick walls. The ashes flew into his face, filled his mouth and clogged his nose. He was suffocating. He spun in circles, unable to see, coating his wet fur with fine, adhesive ash. He spluttered and whimpered ’til, finally, there! He saw light. Dozer got his feet under him. With a leap that carried him over the table and past George, Dozer flew from his breathless cave and scampered, his each step a muddy footprint, across the house, up the ladder—where he had never gone before—and onto Jody’s bed, where he lay cowering and soiling the counterpane for the next three hours.

George, on the other hand, had a stroke of luck. Beneath the fireplace table was a rug. Once on the rug, the paper bag no longer slip-slid along the floor. George’s hind paws got traction at last. With a mighty, mehitabelic yowl, he sank hid claws the clinging paper, shredding it ’til he was able to roll free from its grip and restore all four feet under his body. Without looking back (cats never look back), George strolled away from the scene of the incident with leonine dignity. 

George passed Dozer, tucked into a muddy ball on Jody’s bed, as he departed by way of the handy skylight.

Of course, when the family got home, they found wreckage. Dad had to carry a still traumatized Dozer down the ladder. Mom nearly wept over the shards of her vase and the trampled roses. Jody helped clean up the fireplace and the trail of Dozer’s pawprints. Jody’s bedding went into the laundry. Save for a mysteriously shredded paper bag, there was no evidence that George had been there that day. 

Gaby’s theory of the crime, to which no one else subscribed, involved a squirrel entering through the chimney and searching for acorns in the paper bag. Furious after finding no nuts, the squirrel attacked Dozer, who retaliated by chasing the squirrel into the fireplace. There, after a flurry of paw-to-paw combat, the squirrel escaped up the chimney like Santa Claus, leaving Dozer, bloody, muddy and blameless, as the fall dog.

For a week, there was no sign of George, an absence that allowed the paper-bag conundrum to fade in the family’s memory. 

The bronze angel incident

Carl Noel was a yuletide fanatic. He loved the season. He had actually designed his dream house with Christmas in mind. On one side of the front door opposite the fireplace, a floor-to-ceiling window, fifteen feet all, dominated the house’s facade. Every year since the family had moved in, Dad had hauled into the house a gigantic fir or balsam that he decorated with a thousand colored lights blinking and winking away. He had become a voracious collector of Christmas ornaments, Santa Clauses, elves and gnomes and snowmen, reindeer, mooses and cardinals, stars and snowflakes, bunnies, teddy bears, owls and mice, cherubs, Magi and nutcrackers, balloons, half-moons and sunbursts, drums, violins, harps and horns, clowns and cuties, Virgin Marys and Christchildren, even frogs and vegetables. His crowning glory was an “angel,” custom-molded in polished bronze after the abstract style of Constantin Brancusi. This, his piece de resistance, went on the very top of the tree every year, and every year Mom trembled with anxiety as Dad climbed fifteen feet up the ladder to laboriously affix the glistening angel just below the ceiling. 

Dad even installed a special lamp on the wall opposite the treetop to spotlight his bronze angel. Every year, after descending the ladder, he would stand staring upward, studying the angel’s position, asking Mom if it was straight, judging whether the light was showing it to best advantage, pondering whether he should climb back up and make adjustments, to which Mom always said, “Oh no, honey. It’s perfect. I wouldn’t touch it. It’s fine, really. Please don’t go back up there.” 

Carl Noel was also an ecumenical guy. He loved all the year-end holidays. So, besides an elaborate papier maché Christmas creche beneath his mighty tree, he also installed a menorah, to honor Chanukah. He was never actually sure when Chanukah fell during any particular December, so—to play it safe—he kept all nine candles lit throughout the season. The effect, beginning just after Mom’s birthday, was an almost blinding display of Christmas tree lights along with the blazing menorah and another dozen candles fashioned in the shape of Santa Claus, Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, etc. Jody loved it. Mom was always relieved when the day-long project of trimming the tree had ended. Gaby, the family busybody, inevitably quibbled. She would say, “Daddy, you put this humongous tree in this big window. But we’re here in the woods. There’s nobody to see it!”

To which, every year, Dad would say, “We see it, sweetheart. It’s a family thing.”

“Yeah,” Gaby would reply. “Right.”

Indeed, after the tree went up and Dad turned on all those thousand dazzling lights and the whole family trooped outside to behold its glory through the towering window, it was really a breathtaking sight. 

“Oh, dear, it’s very nice,” Mom would tell Dad.

“Pretty cool,” Jody usually said. 

Even Gaby had to admit she was impressed.

And Dad would say, “I think it’s better than last year. This is the best tree ever, don’t you think.”

Agreement was unanimous.

Even George liked the tree.

Perhaps too much.

To your typical cat, the appeal of a Christmas tree, beyond its alluring fragrance and the flavor of the needles, is the plethora of dangling objects hanging down from its lowermost branches. George, however, didn’t immediately succumb to all these attractions. When first he beheld this astounding addition to his surrogate family’s domain, George was apprehensive. He prowled gingerly all around its spreading perimeter, sniffing and twitching his tail. He winced and blinked at the glare of its lights. This immense tree suddenly erected inside the house might have confirmed George’s suspicion that humans are crazy, but there’s no telling, because the mind of a cat is a black box. 

By his next visit, George had adapted. The tree was there, perhaps permanently, and it clearly afforded him possibilities for amusement. The ornaments were particularly appealing. He discovered that when he batted a ball, or a Santa, or a dangling bell, it bobbed around and swung back at his face, which afforded him the pleasure of hitting it again, eventually turning the experience into a boxing bout. When George got bored with this, he curled up on the flannel skirt beneath the tree, a bed scented with pine needles, for a yuletide snooze.

It was during one of these naps, on Christmas Eve, when George opened his eyes and spied the snake.

Living in a bungalow in the woods, George had experience with snakes. They lurked among leaves on the forest floor. They slid silently along the ground,  menacing songbirds, rabbits, chipmunks and other critters that George regarded as his personal prey. George resented snakes and he pounced on them whenever he saw one. Inevitably, however, the snake would elude George’s first thrust and foil George with one of two tactics. Most times, the snake would just slither away at a surprising speed and disappear into undergrowth too dense for George to follow. A few times, however, the threatened snake curled into a ball, its head exposed and beady eyes glaring at George, its tongue licking in and out of its mouth, daring the cat to go ahead, come after me, but be ready for me to bite you in the face and swallow one of your eyes. 

In those cases, George muted the call of the wild and retreated to the safety of human habitation.

So, George was suddenly alert and wary at the sight of a long green snake lurking beneath the wonderful giant shrub in the middle of his human habitation. This wasn’t fair! Poised himself to attack the interloper and chase it back outdoors where serpents belong, George hesitated. Cautiously, he pawed it once, barely touching it, testing its reaction. Would it flee or stand its ground?

It remained motionless. This was all the assurance George needed. He had a snake cornered, inside the house. There was no underbrush into which it could crawl. George finally had a snake, his woodland nemesis, as vulnerable as a sparrow.

George pounced. He had it. It didn’t twist or turn. It didn’t curl up or fight back. Was it dead? George didn’t care. He was a predator. Dead or alive, the snake was his quarry. He wasn’t letting go. He sank his teeth into the snake, unaware of its secret defense.

Electricity!

George had bitten into an electric snake. It wouldn’t let him go! Its charge coursed through George’s bloodstream like a tongue of flame. For a moment, if observed from a near vantage point, George resembled a Loony Tunes tabby, his legs splayed, his hair standing out in spikes, his eyes bulging, tendrils of smoke rising from his ears.

Unable to let go, George launched his second option. He ran, and ran, in circles, circumnavigating the immense Christmas tree, dragging behind him the electric cord that lit the thousand lights. With each circuit, the cord tightened around the base of the tree, like a noose. 

At last, the snake fell out of George’s teeth and the piercing, brain-numbing pain subsided. George crouched beneath the boughs, stricken with an all-consuming depth of paranoia possible only in cats. In its struggle, the snake had wrapped itself around George’s throat. George’s solution was to run. He didn’t know why he had to run, exactly. But he had to. It was a cat thing. Only another cat would understand. 

He looked for a way out. 

There!

George burst from beneath the tree, plowing through Dad’s lovely hand-painted papier maché Nativity diorama, trampling Joseph and shoving the Virgin into the manger. Cows and sheep flew every which way. By the time George had reached the menorah and knocked it aside, the snake around his neck had tightened. He scrabbled all the harder to escape its grip. He scurried to the left and it wouldn’t let go. He tried sprinting to the right. The snake hung on.

As a matter of physics, it would seem inconceivable that a cat weighing perhaps ten pounds could tip the balance of a fifteen-foot balsam fir. But, as anyone knows who has tried to situate and straighten a Christmas tree, your typical tannenbaum is treacherously top-heavy with trimmings and baubles. It teeters in delicate balance. So, just as George wrenched free from the light cord, as flames from the fallen menorah set fire to the skirt—littered with dry needles—beneath the tree, Dad’s mighty balsam lost is mooring and tipped into the great window, striking it with both a coniferous thump and an ominous crack. 

George’s antics had, of course, caught the attention of Dad and Mom, Jody and Gaby. Dozer was slower on the uptake and too close to the action. By the time Dozer realized that George was tangled in an electric cord, the tree was toppling and flames were licking up into its branches, his tail was on fire. He began to gallop around the house, knocking things over. 

“Jesus CHRIST!” shouted Dad. 

In the next moments, as Jody chased Dozer with a glass of water and Dad rooted in the closet for a fire extinguisher, Mom stood gaping in horror. She watched the fire creep toward Christmas presents she had spread festively beneath the far boughs of the mighty tannenbaum. Gaby kept busy taking photos with her mobile phone. 

Jody managed to douse Dozer’s tail, which had shrunk somewhat and continued to smoke. Dad was poised to unleash the extinguisher when everyone in the family realized the meaning of that cracking sound they had heard when the tree leaned into the window. Dad’s Brancusi angel, the heaviest and hardest ornament on the tree, had struck the window with hammerlike force. The window was made of sturdy stuff and it had held, except for a little crack. A moment later, audible even over the carols crooning from his stereo, Dad heard the sound of the crack expanding. It spread outward and down in an erratic staccato as the family listened in frozen, dreadful suspense. 

By the time the web of cracks reached just about to Dad’s height, the weight of the Christmas tree finished off the window. With a sudden whoosh and a tinkling cascade of glass that magically reflected the colors of a thousand lights, the window collapsed. The tree went prostrate, rather gracefully, ending up half outside the house and welcoming inside a cold solstice wind, flecked with snowflakes.

The Christmas lights still gleamed. The fire beneath still burned. After a few minutes, Dad with the fire extinguisher, Jody and Mom with a brief bucket brigade, had stanched the flames. There was remarkably little damage to the structure of Dad’s dream house—except for a scorched floor and the fallen window. 

Gaby got pictures of the entire event.

George missed most of the drama. Once free from the devious electric snake, he had left his troubles behind, slipped through the skylight and headed home, wherever that might be. 

Aftermath

That night, after the volunteer fire department had dropped by and made sure there were no lingering embers, the family left everything pretty much as it was and spent the night in the nearest motel. 

On Christmas day, Dad somehow found a local contractor willing to work triple-time on the holiday. By afternoon, the fifteen-foot window frame in Dad’s dream house had been filled by an expanse of plywood shielding the family from the winter blast. The house was still freezing and unlikely to warm up for 24 hours. 

Dad and Jody spent an hour salvaging ornaments and untangling Christmas lights. Then, without eulogy, Dad dumped the tree over the edge of the hill and into the rocky ravine. Back inside, the family faced a soggy pile of Christmas presents that had been stacked in the atrium by the volunteer firefighters. They decided to let them dry out for a day or two before examining Santa’s bounty. Bravely, Mom applied herself to Christmas, which wasn’t ready to eat ’til long after dark. But the family kept a stuff upper lip, sat down to their holiday in their winter coats and mufflers, listened to Christmas music on the stereo and gave Dozer a big bowl of roast turkey and stuffing as consolation for his torched tail. 

Over dessert, Dad started to smile, which prompted Gaby to giggle, which got Jody laughing. Mom rolled her eyes and Dozer, despite a little discomfort, wagged his bandage.

“This is one Christmas,” said Mom, “that we’ll never forget.”

Around midnight, as Jody was drifting off to sleep, George found an opening in the skylight just wide enough to squeeze his head through. Jody felt the familiar plop of cat’s feet on his bed. George settled in beside Jody’s face and began to purr. Together, on Christmas night, they fell guiltlessly asleep.