“Jack got up in the middle of the night and he saw a girl run through the trees. The next morning — we had built this little snowman, well, a little snow girl, actually — and it was knocked over and the scarf and mittens were gone. It sounds silly, but I think the child must have done it. It’s not that I mind, really. I would have given them to her if she needed them so. I’m just worried she was lost or something. Imagine, a little girl out in the woods in winter like that.”
“A long line of nervous, fidgeting, greedy urchins wound in and out of the aisles, shoving, sniffling, and above all waiting, waiting to tell HIM what they wanted. In those days it was not easy to disbelieve fully in Santa Claus, because there wasn’t much else to believe in, and there were many theological arguments over the nature of, the existence of, the affirmation and denial of his existence. However, ten days before zero hour, the air pulsing to the strains of “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” the store windows garlanded with green-and-red wreaths, and the toy department bristling with shiny Flexible Flyers, there were few who dared to disbelieve.”
My Christmas tree is decorated mainly with a couple hundred shatterproof silver and gold ornaments that I bought last year when my pup Lobo was just a few months old. While I have a collection of glass and ceramic ornaments, I decided not to use most of them since I didn’t really know how this energetic wolf-pup was going to react to a giant green and glittery thing suddenly (well, not that suddenly) appearing in front of the living room window with all sorts of shiny stuff hanging from it. The photo below is from last October, when he was about four months old, with a little piece of the back yard sticking out of his mouth. Highly motivated to carry things, it’s not unusual for him to bring in leaves, pebbles, and sticks — including sticks that are too wide to fit through the door without him taking a few seconds to figure out how to turn them and slip them through.
Toys and balls get taken outside, because, you know, carrying things works both ways. Dog biscuits aren’t eaten; they’re carried. Drop a pen: it’s carried. Socks on the floor, dishtowels, a fallen piece of paper: carried. You get the picture. So I was certain he’d snatch things off the tree and carry them around the house, and I got shatterproof ornaments just in case they were to be batted off the branches then carried away.
A year later — with the tree once again decorated with the new unbreakables — this is as close as he ever gets to it. That’s the tree skirt in the lower left corner; the tree itself gets barely a glance. He doesn’t lay under it because he doesn’t like being under things … a funny little personality quirk that I’ve notice since he was a pup: even if we’re tossing a ball around the house, he’ll wait for it to roll out from underneath a coffee table before he snaps it up. Should the ball roll under the dining room table and stop against the table legs, he’ll alarm-bark until the properly trained human retrieves it for him. So we can only get pictures of him near the tree, not under it. Dogs are such a hoot.
Here are a few shots of the silver and gold ornaments, installed on the tree for the sake of the dog. It was fun to see how the pictures came out, with the silver reflecting mostly blue luminance from the tree lights and the gold reflecting mostly red. The angels in the last four shots are on the tree also; apparently to the pup those do have carrying potential, and I catch him occasionally staring at those, most likely while working on a strategy to get them in his mouth.
