With apologies to reindeer and polar bears, cats are the ultimate holiday animals.
This is only incidentally due to their skill in conquering Christmas trees.
But while no ornament is safe at Tabby’s Place, the windswept and the weary find a home in Rashida‘s eye.
Let’s be honest, kittens. Mid-December is a toddler, tugging our sleeves and playing roughly with our memories. Tantrums thrum between the epic and the inane.
Bleary over Amazon’s 73rd page of results for “cheetah-print hoodies,” we feel old.
Lost among our nearest and dearest over cocktails, we feel small.
Shivery for handwoven meaning, we feel ornamental, incidental, sequins in the snow.
We are hope marbled with doubt. Will this year bring peace to our patch of earth? Will we see each other across the table? Will we find a warm place to lay down in the dark and rise up in the light?
Rashida knows a bit about darkness and light. On the long winter’s march to Tabby’s Place, Rashida (Sheedy to her friends) choked down darkness in doses large enough to kill a polar bear. At age 15+, suffering from uncontrolled diabetes, Rashida had been given up, given over to the night, given no cocoa or consideration.
There was no room at the inn, no family around the fireplace.
There was light.
Every cat is born with a candle, a marvelous light that no human being can give or take away. It’s the fire that fuels their mayhem (ornament assassination, ham croquette banditry, etc.) and the truth that tells them who they are. It’s why they can survive and sing carols over sufferings that would squash us like sweet potatoes. It’s why they can stay sweet when Santa doesn’t show, and dinner doesn’t show, and all they have to show for their day is dignity.
Rashida’s candle was bright.
Rashida’s light lassoed a star.
And our shining Sheedy carried on, in the impossible way of cats and children and saints and angels.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall rescue cats. I will never understand how cats have radar for precisely the people they need, only that it happens, and happens, and happens again, until we’re not permitted the luxury of believing that anything is an accident. And so it was that Rashida came into kindness, and the right person shepherded her to Tabby’s Place.
Tabby’s Place, of course, is an all-season manger for the shaggy and the ragged, the grinning inn where the piano is always playing, and there are cookies fresh from the oven no matter what time you arrive. The stranger at our door is the meaning of our lives. If you are exhausted and exasperated and feline, our entire not-quite-heavenly host bursts into song the moment you arrive.
It’s OK if you break an ornament or twelve. It’s OK if you forget the lyrics. It’s OK if you smell like garlic or burrow under the buffalo plaid blanket or take a very, very, very long time to get over your fear. It’s OK if you were the last cat picked, so long as you can get used to being the first and foremost and fervently loved.
It’s okay if you, like Sheedy, are ancient, diabetic, and gazing the light through one eye that scarcely sees.
You are the opposite of an ornament. You are the entire tree. You are the entire treasure.
And if your light is as bright as Rashida’s, you just might tell us the entire truth.
Blessed are the dunderheaded, for they can still be surprised. I will never understand how the cats outdo us in love, only that it happens, and it happens, and it happens again, until we’re not permitted the luxury of believing that darkness wins. And so it was that Sheedy came into our lives, and our lives started to look like holidays.
It happened when Rashida started looking at us, really looking. You know the feeling when a cat is staring at you, not through you, not even for the purpose of summoning ham croquettes, but at you, into you. Having seen both darkness and light, Sheedy had the courage to look directly into the humans.
Rashida liked what she saw.
Because Rashida saw children.
While we were busy blustering, decorating and agonizing and shopping and dropping the plot of our wild and luscious lives, Sheedy saw us.
Compassion on four legs, Rashida saw giddy niblets who wanted a tender surprise, picked just for us.
A manger with whiskers, ‘Sheeda saw tired toddlers who needed pizza rolls and a nap, not gilded gifts or fresh-squeezed guilt.
A gentle genius, Rashida saw sweet, sweet kittens in gangly grown suits, and if she couldn’t get us to put on our snowsuits and play, she would play for us.
So Rashida got to giddying.
Sheedy got to sillying.
Rashida got to holi-doings, every merry day, until…well, we laughed. Even better, we giggled. The wisest among us collapsed into kisses and joined the jamboree.
We forgot to be overwrought by whatever dingy darkness was wringing our day.
We remembered to be overcome by levity and light.
Blessed are the cats, for they can coax children out of caves. I will never understand how they enlarge us back to innocence, only that it happens, and it happens, and it happens again, until we’re not permitted the luxury of heaviness.
Rashida is not my first Christmas cat. That would be Fig Newton, the consolation prize for my Type 1 diabetes diagnosis. Sugared with seriousness, I was a ponderous little plum, the oldest nine-year-old alive. But my Figgy pudding plucked me from quicksand and let me live again.
He saved me.
But then, saving old children is just what the ultimate holiday animals do, in and out of season.
It happens and it happens and it happens, and it will happen again.