A Non-PETA-Approved Christmas

Christmas.

I love Christmas.

I really do.

I love the decorations, the lights, the food, the music. I love being surrounded by family and visiting with long lost friends. I love how kind and giving people become. I love how there is peace on Earth and goodwill towards men everywhere... except in the Fox News studios and on board international flights from Copenhagen. And because I'm an English teacher, I love looking for the different themes that develop each year as the holiday progresses. Some themes repeat annually for decades, like Christmas morning scones and family nativity pageants. Other themes cycle around, reoccurring for new generations, like Cabbage Patch Dolls and toy kitchens.

Some of the most memorable Christmas themes are unique to a specific year, like Moose's sunglasses with purple robe fashion phase from the early 90's.

This year we were blessed with the continuation of several traditional themes, like the Christmas morning missionary phone call, but one unique theme was also evident in the events and conversations of the last week: animal cruelty.

Yes. That's right.

I said, er, typed, animal cruelty.

This Christmas shall forever be known as the Animal Cruelty Christmas. Here are some of the reasons why:

Chloe, the neurotic bat-eared rat-dog, was an honored guest during our holiday festivities. The poor thing had to spend the better part of a week being petted, hand-fed, and screeched at by my woof-woof loving nieces. She also had to share her chew toy with neighbor dog Jimmy and, as an only child, Chloe was not down with sharing.

The second animal to be abused this Christmas was Bert the hippo. My mother helped to perform some elective whoopee cushion surgery on him that turned him into Bert the farthing hippo from NCIS.

But that bit of animal cruelty was for a good cause. His new gastrointestinal abilities, combined with a spiked leather caller, made him the perfect gift for my life-long pal Brook.

The next supporting detail for my mammalian malignity main idea (Hooray for Thesaurus.com!) was brought about by Jenny's kid's special Christmas request for Aunt Me... stuffed cats. I ordered them online and was met with a disturbing sight when I opened the boxes they were shipped in...

I thought about leaving the poor things in their plastic tombs and wrapping them for the children that way. But then I remembered that I was planning on delivering those gifts in person and the idea of waking up in the night to the sounds of the children's suffocated cat nightmares wasn't all that appealing.
Mikey counts the shirts I gave him as cruelty to brothers, but I think he will change his tune when he is late for class at BYU and hasn't done laundry for a few weeks.

There was quite a bit of high-tech cruelty going on too.

If my dad would have known how soundly my mother would trounce him at bowling, he might have spared himself the suffering and bought my mom a new blender instead of a wii.

Which would have saved a lot of suffering on my part since Mikey has been kicking my trash and my bunny's fuzzy tail at the Rabbids 2 game on a regular basis since Christmas morning.

When I started this post, I thought the animal cruelty theme was unique to Christmas 2009, then I came across this photo from a Christmas Eve back in the 1980's. Apparently the torture of small, fuzzy fuzzy has been a long standing tradition in our family.

But as long as Moose's peak-a-boo robe and aviators sunglasses stay a one-time occurrence, I'll keep my animal cruelty complaints to a minimum.