It’s Christmas Day.
It’s Christmas Day, and you’re here, drawn to the cats like a child to the snow.
It’s Christmas Day, and our child-hearts are together, where they belong.
Kittens, I don’t know how 2023 has treated you. I can’t presume the graces that have given you life and the losses that have changed everything, the hours you thought you couldn’t survive and the minutes that made the world new.
But I know that something brought you to this rustic corner of the internet today, and it wasn’t my ramshackle prose.
Something tugs you Tabby’s Place-ward through wind and wonder, and it’s not boredom.
Something has knit you into our family, this wild fringed sweater that fits everyone who loves like a fool.
Something keeps telling us that fools and children and cats will save us.
Something keeps us from forgetting that we are in constant need of saving.
And like the cats whose lives hang on our promises, we get our needs mysteriously met.
We are saved when a sad-eyed stranger shuffles out of the house of fear.
We are saved when our love lands, our eyes lock, and both sides lowers the drawbridge.
We are saved when the lie of loneliness stretches so taut it splits, and another heart sings our song.
We are saved when the weakest are our strongest allies, seven pounds of steel against self-pity.
We are saved when the “impossible” is invincible, ineffable, inexorable.
We are saved when unhuggables are beloved and “home” hobbles our doubts.
We are saved when sadness crashes into neon joy, when the marzipan “now” undoes every knot.
We are saved when we fail, we lose, and we howl, and still the bond endures.
We are saved when we are denied admission to our distrust, when the sharp certainties of cynicism can’t survive strange tenderness.
We are saved by cats who are silk and soot, fire and ash, everything we live for and everything we dream of beyond the creaky walls of this life.
We are saved by believing that every life can, should, must be saved.
We are saved by dunking all notion of “deserving” in the deepest ocean, with fruitcake tied to its feet.
We are saved by a love so outrageous, it forgets to bolt the door, check the guest list, or maintain any expectations whatsoever, other than its own inability to end.
We are saved by seeing ourselves reflected in glass-green eyes, and in each other’s eyes, and in the tireless Tabbification of our world.
We are saved by grace that gives and gives and gives and gives and never, ever, ever stops.
We may be fools in the eyes of the world, but let the axis twirl.
We understand so little.
We love so much.
We have everything we need.
Merry Christmas, kittens.
Every cat pictured here was saved in 2023 because you loved. Pictured top to bottom: Prescott, Ash & Vinnie, Buster, Trifecta, Harriet, Harvey.