As it begins to look more and more like Christmas this year, the cats look more and more confused. Lily seems mesmerized by all of the jingle jangle sparklies placed all around the house and awfully curious. She has had her paw in practically every holiday activity. She helped decorate the tree. She inspected all of the Santas and snowmen that went up around the house. She had lots of fun playing hide and seek while we wrapped packages. She even tried to get involved on cookie-baking day.
Of course all of this is still fairly new to Lily. This is only her second Christmas. Sophie and Max have experienced seven and thirteen Christmases with us respectively. And neither of them have discovered much joy in the season. Oh, they like hiding under the Christmas tree. But they know that the holidays and the extra time spent in the kitchen and running the motorized monster over the carpeting more often than usual, probably means company. And they do not like company.
Lily does, however. She enjoys meeting new people and seeing old friends. I was concerned last year about her getting stepped on or tripped over because she is so underfoot, as a rule. But I was pleasantly surprised to watch as Lily took the high road around the room last year. She hopped and leapt from chair to chair and end table to sofa—often landing in a lap or two along the way—when she wanted to journey from place to place. It was uncanny, how she avoided the floor and the many pairs of feet milling around down there.
She is sleeping now, which leads me to believe that, unlike the other two lazy cats, she’ll be wide awake when guests arrive this afternoon and more than ready to accept some petting, play with her feather toy while some patient person shakes it across the floor and just enjoy being in the company of people.
She is a social cat—so social, in fact, that I sometimes refer to her as my “puppy.”
To learn more about Lily, Sophie, Max and over thirty other cats, order my book, Catscapades. True Cat Tales: http://www.matilijapress.com/catscapades.html
