The cat did it

Every family has their falling Christmas tree story. The year of the skinny cedar cut from a friend's property is a story that is unique only in how MANY times it fell. It was at least five times that I picked the damn thing up and tried a different method of securing it. That year I realized I was truly an optimist. Perhaps an optimist is just another name for an inept idiot, but I was determined it was going to stay. Luckily, Claire was young enough that the idea of a tree in the house was so bizarre that it really didn't matter if it was horizontal or vertical. She may have even thought the up and down tree was all part of the holiday entertainment. If I had had any sense, I would have just left it on the floor and let her think that was how it was supposed to be.

The Creek Lane Drive house was the scene of my childhood falling Christmas tree tale. My mother, a nurse, had to leave for work at 6:30 am and my father left shortly afterwards. It was my job to watch the three younger ones until it was time to go to school. As I set the breakfast dishes in the sink, I heard a crash and the shattering of fragile ornaments. The cat raced from the room and hid under a bed. Randy and Leslie, who were seven and five, stood in wide-eyed horror as I surveyed the damage. "What happened?" I asked. "The cat knocked down the Christmas tree," Randy finally got out.

I called my parents at work and they told us to go on to school and they'd deal with it later. For years, it was just another story of how the cat knocked down the Christmas tree. One year someone found a Garfield-climbing-a-Christmas-tree ornament to commemorate the event. Every year at Christmas as the ornament was hung, the story would get told once again, always in the same way.

Always, that is, until just a few years ago, when Randy interrupted the telling with a confession. "You know," he began, "it wasn't the cat who knocked it down. It was Leslie and me." As we sat with open mouths, Leslie glared at him and suggested in rather strong language that he might have waited another thirty years before telling THAT story.

It seems that the two of them were curious about their presents and were under the tree shaking packages. Unfortunately the tree was a bit unsteady and one particularly heavy gift standing on the leg of the stand was all that kept it erect. When the package was lifted, gravity took over and the tree began its slow but inevitable descent to the floor.

Most good stories have a moral and perhaps the moral of this one should be how your sins will always find you out or something along that line. But it's not. The lesson that we kids learned from this event is that one should always, ALWAYS have a cat to blame things on.