What Really Happens on Christmas Morning

A few years ago, in the very, very early part of Christmas morning, Jonathan and I woke up to the sound of breaking glass.

“SMASH!”

Well, nobody wants to wake up to the sound of glass breaking. Plus, we live in a neighborhood that’s, um, “undergoing change.” So, you know . . .

But – our home security system hadn’t sounded. So maybe nothing really happened. Maybe the Christmas tree fell over. Maybe . . .

We ran down the stairs and our cat Sidney ran past us. We did find broken glass – all around the dining room table.

Our table and the little buffet next to it were decked out with flowers. Apparently Sidney climbed up on the buffet to check out the flowers and knocked over a glass vase.

Merry Christmas to you too, Sidney!

Since then, Sidney has gone to the great catnip field in the sky and we have a new cat named Dandelion. This year I came downstairs on Christmas morning to find no broken glass.

On Christmas Eve we hosted over a dozen people for Wigilia. We hooked our mobile dishwater up to our sink and set it to run overnight. Then we went to bed.

I came down Christmas morning to unhook the dishwasher. I started to move it away from the sink.

Wow, the dishwasher wheels are making brown tracks. Oh, hey, there’s more brown stuff next to it. And – a huge brown lake next to the sink! Oh, my. Did the dishwasher leak?

Nope. The dishwasher hadn’t leaked.

The brown stuff? It was molasses!

Dandelion had climbed on the dishwasher and knocked a bottle of molasses off of it. Said bottle landed on the floor and discarded its lid. The bottle’s contents formed a lake of sticky goo in front of our sink. It also got into the wheels of the dishwasher.

We started Christmas morning by cleaning up the molasses that coated a section of our kitchen floor.

Also, a few weeks ago Dandelion knocked all of our nativity figurines onto the floor. I lost the entire Holy Family for ten minutes. I debated going without them, but figured that people would notice.

The thing is, I can tell these stories and still maintain that cats make fantastic pets. Must mean that I have turned into a cat lady.

Merry Christmas, Dandelion.