All Lit Up
My Christmas decorations were stored in the back of a closet that also housed the lesser-known and seldom-used stuff of life. Behind that door were the testaments to poor consumer decision-making, the detritus of the formerly functional, and decades-old piles of evidentiary and questionable judgment in bad taste in fashion. Once I opened that door and threw something in, it became just another resident of a forgotten ecosystem that sunlight would not touch again.
Every year I had to forage through the disused stuff in that closet to rediscover the disused Christmas stuff.
Having decided to tackle untangling the wad of Christmas tree lights I retrieved from the closet, I settled down on the living room floor with the huge bin of lights. My cats soon surrounded me, intently studying my work.
Once out of the original purchase box, any single string of Christmas tree lights cannot—by law, I believe—ever be put back into the same box in any ordered fashion. Therefore, after their first use, the lights are thrown into a big bin containing other light strings from previous holiday seasons. There they co-mingle and become one huge clump of lights. There is a brisk retail business in Christmas lights each year because people give up trying to unravel the damn things and simply go out and buy new ones.
My cats probably thought my activity was just another “odd human thing.” They were right. After a morning of untangling—without a single liberated strand of lights to show for it—I went into the kitchen, made myself some coffee, and opened up a new tin of Danish butter cookies, a favorite holiday snack. After my break, I replaced the lid on the tin and headed back to tackle my mound of lights in the living room.
I was so wrapped up in my untangling duty that both time and noise vanished. So certain that I was on the cusp of a “breakthrough” moment in which I would at last set all the lights free, I never realized the cats were no longer surrounding me.
Nor did I ever hear the cookie tin hit the floor and begin its meandering journey up and down the kitchen.
It never clicked in my mind that my own time-tested warning siren should have blared in my head: IF THE CATS ARE OUT OF VISUAL RANGE, IMMEDIATE RECONNAISSANCE IS NEEDED!
From the evidence greeting me in the kitchen, it appeared that one or more feline snouts, working in rare collective fashion, had pushed open the lid of the tin and had their way with the cookies. In fact, one of the perpetrators remained at the scene and was still engrossed in committing the crime, oblivious to my startled stare.
The feline offender was methodically nibbling the ridges off the swirly-shaped cookies—the ones that happen to be my favorite. Once she had nibbled all the ridges off one cookie and rendered it a smooth, spittle-covered hockey puck, she simply went on to the next cookie of that same design. Her mouth and face were so covered with cookie crumbs that she resembled a Muppet—and a down-on-its-luck one at that. This cat, who had flown from coast to coast and was bathed for show appearances in an expensive special shampoo with silk extract, now looked like a low-rent flunky from the wrong side of Sesame Street.
After cleaning things up, I removed the cat culprit to my bathroom, where she could quietly ponder her affinity for the Danes and their baked goods, and then have a nice upchuck once all the cookie ridges she’d eaten coalesced to revolt against her gut.
I returned to the pile of lights on my living room floor, a pile that had not changed in size since I lugged it out of the closet.
I started thinking that maybe I would be better off just leaving the congealed collection of lights in the middle of the living room, plugging in the cord, and allowing folks passing by my window outside to assume there was something deeply meaningful about the blinking, twinkling lights arranged in a huge heap on the floor. My neighbors would acknowledge their admiration for my yuletide originality by not welcoming me—and my festive gelatin salad—at their holiday parties.
I gave up on the big ball of lights and tossed them back in the bin. As I put my coat on for the trip to the store to pick up some new boxes of Christmas tree lights and a necessary replacement for the denuded Danish butter cookies, I heard the first of a series of guttural “ACK ACKs” coming from the bathroom upstairs.
Okay, need some paper towels too.