Tucum Saves Christmas

Smokey and I had a low-key Christmas this year. We decided to revive a tradition from his childhood and we started out Christmas morning by singing happy birthday to Jesus and eating donuts.

While it's hard to top that kind of a start to the day, we actually had stockings this year and a fireplace to put them by, so a big improvement over last year.




One thing that hasn't changed: bearcat. She knows those boxes Mom sends are full of stuff for her. And Frog staked out the new bag of catnip approximately two seconds after I brought it home last week.

The other half of the box contents are for these beasts. They only get one new soft toy per year now because that's as often as I feel like throwing my money away and cleaning up after them. Percy is the queen of rip and tear.

This year, it was an armadillo. Look close because in less than 20 minutes Percy had an ear ripped off. Tatonka was content to just carry it around.

We now refer to the living room as the cat play room. Oh yeah, we got presents too. Smokey got ice climbing/mountaineering gear among other things. And I got running shoes and a jacket.
We took the dogs for a walk through the park after presents. And we got a Christmas miracle. An ice cleat Smokey lost last week was sitting on a post. Then the miracle was balanced out by the truck not starting when we decided to go see Sherlock Holmes. We couldn't even jump it. So we took the trusty Tucumcari out of winter storage and transfered the skis and went to town. Never again will I go see a movie on Christmas. It was sold out. And so was the next showing. So we bought tickets for the next available showing and went skiing. Then we stuffed ourselves with theater food.