She'll never forget ...

I got caught up in the saga of the ghost kitty and neglected to post this image of my nephew Mike and his niece, Milagros, with the gigantic plush elephant I gave her for Christmas. Her mother tells me that Milagros, who is 4, totes it around through the house, sleeps with it and uses it for a pillow when she's napping on the couch.

I gave my great nephew Carlos, who is 7, a simple digital camera for Christmas. After a rough start -- the memory card that came with it didn't work -- Carlos has been taking lots of pictures. Among them, pictures of his feet, pictures of what's up his nose, pictures of trees, pictures of his sister, and pictures of cartoon shows on TV.

We had dinner together Wednesday night. He had already taken more than 450 pictures in three days, and he fired away all through the meal.

I asked him to pick out the one he likes best this weekend and send it to me. I'll post the image as soon as he passes it along.

I hope it's not the one he shot up his nose. His mother hopes it's not the one he took of her bottom. She told me she was going to delete that one.

The saga of the ghost kitty

Lord knows, I hope I haven't snatched away a non-lost cat.

I don't think I have. But it's possible.

Regular readers might recall that, on Dec. 7, I posted about the "ghost kitty" who had started to hang out in the neighborhood. She's a beautiful cat, obviously tame and loving. But nobody on my block admitted to knowing who she was or to whom she belonged. Several of the neighbors said they had taken pity on her and fed her.

She seemed to like to sit on my deck or lounge in the back yard in the sunlight. She would come up to me whenever I went out on the deck and rub against my legs, wordlessly asking to be loved. She would let me pick her up and hold her without struggling. She purred loudly.

This went on for some weeks, during which time it became clear that she was slowly losing weight.

On Christmas Eve day, after much thought, I gave her a small cat-bowl of dry food and a small bowl of water. Was it the season that led me to feed her? Perhaps.

Over the course of the next half hour, she ate a full bowl of food -- more than my cat, Cassie, eats in three days -- and she drank half of the bowl of water.

I lined a cardboard box with a towel, cut a small door in the box, and put it on the deck. There were traces of cat fur in it on Christmas morning, so I suspect she used it as a bed for at least a portion of the night.

On Christmas day, I again put out a full bowl of cat food and filled the water dish. The ghost kitty came running. She again ate a full bowl of food and drank half the water.

We have a fairly elaborate e-mail tree in our neighborhood, so I sent out a message on Christmas afternoon, along with the picture you see above, asking if anybody knew this cat or where she might live. One of the recipients posted the message and the picture to a Yahoo! group devoted to lost pets on Richmond's Northside.

On the day after Christmas, I again fed the ghost kitty and gave her fresh water. She ate and drank well, but she didn't finish her bowl of food. Perhaps she was feeling less of a need to stuff herself.

Then the e-mail responses to my lost-cat notice began to pour in. There was lots of good advice. And there were two people who actually wanted to do something. I couldn't bring the ghost kitty into my house because Cassie has a chronic upper-respirator infection, and my vet and the specialist vets who diagnosed Cassie advised me that she was both potentially contagious to other cats and more susceptible to infections that don't seriously bother other cats.

Last evening I petted the ghost kitty for a while, mostly to say goodbye, then put her in my carrier. Twenty minutes later, Jennifer, one of those who volunteered to help, came by to pick her up and give her a warm home for the night. Acting on instructions given to us by a representative of Richmond's Cat Adoption and Rescue Effort, Jennifer dropped the ghost kitty off at a local vet, where she was examined, scanned to see if she had a microchip, tested for several cat diseases and given a few standard vaccinations.

As of right now, the beautiful and sweet ghost kitty is in the hands of a CARE volunteer and will be safely looked after until a home for her can be found.

The ghost kitty now has a new name, Daisy, given to her by the CARE volunteer.

My thanks go to the selfless people who decided to act when they got word that there was a cat who needed care.

And I wish Daisy much love as she begins a new adventure.

A friend of mine calls this group rescue effort a tiny Christmas miracle.

Perhaps it was.

All wrapped up for Christmas

My favorite Christmas song was written in the middle of a hot summer by a Jew. At the time, I was coming up on 2 years old.

The title is "The Christmas Song" -- catchy, no? -- and it was written in 1944 by Mel Torme. You probably know it as "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire."

(I spent Thanksgiving in Manhattan some years back. As we were walking towards Rockefeller Center I asked my friend Walter, "What's that odd smell?" He didn't notice anything out of the ordinary. A block or so later we passed a man on the street who was working over a charcoal grill. Walter asked me, "Is that what you're smelling?" The man was roasting and selling chestnuts. They didn't smell all that tasty to me. Nonetheless, I still love the song.)

"The Christmas Song" was playing on the radio as I started wrapping presents yesterday. I had done all my Christmas shopping -- most of it online -- within the first week after Thanksgiving. But I had put off the wrapping, primarily because I'm not very good at it.

But yesterday I dragged out the box of wrapping paper, ribbons, bows, scotch tape, scissors, pens and tags that I have accumulated and replenished over the past four decades and set to work. Only one of the presents I bought actually came in a box suitable for wrapping. The rest were of odd sizes and shapes and were a struggle. Cassie chasing ribbons and getting in the middle of things was no help either.

Most of the presents are for the little kids in the family, and I suspect they won't even notice my feeble attempts. And I think I did well enough to avoid any arched eyebrows from the grownups. Maybe, anyway.

So all the work is done, and what's left is the enjoyment.

Watching the kids open their presents tomorrow morning will bring the most delight of the season for me. And that's what it's all about for me -- kids and spreading joy.

So I'm offering this simple phrase
To kids from one to ninety-two
Although it's been said many times, many ways
Merry Christmas to you

Christmases Past

Everything about this tiny artificial tree brings back memories of Christmases past for me.

I inherited it from my mom.

When my sister Dianne and I were little kids, our parents bought and decorated a live Christmas tree each year after we had gone to bed on Christmas Eve. In our family, it was "Santa" who decorated the tree and left it surrounded by presents.

This was in the first decade after World War II. I have no idea where my dad bought a presentable Christmas tree on Christmas Eve, and it wasn't until years later that I realized Christmas trees were heavily discounted on the night before Christmas. It makes sense to me now. Money was in short supply when my parents were young.

After Dianne and I were disabused of the notion of a jolly fat man who came down the chimney to deliver presents to all good little boys and girls -- our chimney led not to a fireplace but to a furnace, although that concept never bothered me when I was 6 years old -- the whole family took to picking out the perfect tree a week before Christmas. Decorating it became a family affair.

Later still, when Dianne and I had moved out on our own, my mom and dad acquired the little artificial tree you see above. But they kept some of the ornaments that used to adorn the big, live trees each year. And they kept many of the things you see beneath the tree in the image above. This year, the tree sits on my dining room table.

Dianne, my mother and my father are all gone now. But I carry on the tradition, and it always brings back happy memories.

Dianne needle-pointed the Happy Holidays ornament you see at the dead center. One of the red ornaments is an early-plastic decoration that probably dates back to 1946. My grandmother crocheted the star image that hangs on a lower branch. The tiny animals always hung high on the live trees from my childhood; they were my mother's favorites.

Beneath the tree is a collection of plastic cars and trucks from my childhood. The little blue bench was part of the setup for the Lionel train I got in 1951. (I imagine that's supposed to be the Baby Jesus sitting on the bench, but I have no recollection of where that little naked figure came from.) The white plastic house and the red plastic church have been under our trees since before I can remember.

I bring out this little tree each year, and after Christmas I wrap it carefully -- still decorated -- and put it away until the next December.

Christmas is a time for memories, for recalling the past and for making new memories for the children in our families. Tacky is trumped by nostalgia.

I decided long ago that this is a good thing.

Tradition is to be accorded great respect.

Adding oomph

All it took was 50 cents worth of red bows.

They added enough pizzazz to my bowl of blue ornaments to make the whole living room look much more like Christmas.

In my last post, I talked about the lack of oomph in my attempt at Christmas cheer. A friend said the bowl full of blue ornaments looked too minimalist, too much like what a fastidious designer might do. He was right.

My friend Walter quickly wrote a comment to my post: "Add a small red bow to one side and it will be stunning."

Okay, done.

And believing that nothing exceeds like excess, I added four little red bows.

Despite what the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said, sometimes less is not more.

Too subtle

My first attempt this year at decorating for Christmas was too understated by far.

Maybe I should have filled that cut-glass bowl with red and green ornaments.

A friend of mine saw what I had done and said, "That's way too designer New York." Whatever he meant by that -- and I think I get it -- he's right: Not enough Christmas oomph.

So I'll move the bowl of blue ornaments to the dining room table this weekend and bring out the small Christmas tree that my parents used to have when we children had grown up and left home. It says "Christmas" much more emphatically. Plus there's the nostalgia factor.

So It's out with the new, and in with the old.

The tiny tree I'll be bringing out tomorrow is artificial, which doesn't earn me any points for sophistication.

But the nostalgia factor is important.

Especially at Christmas.

Ghost kitty

So who's the ghost kitty here?

Is it Cassie, reflected in the glass while she sits inside "her" house contemplating the significance of this neighborhood floozy-cat sprawled on the doormat?

Or is it the faded-gray calico cat on the doormat?

(I have never before seen a calico with what is known in cat-fancier circles as a diluted gray or diluted blue coat. I had to look it up.)

The outdoor calico -- I call her that to distinguish her from Cassie, who is my indoor calico -- appeared in the neighborhood a couple of months ago. At first I thought she was a stray, but I'm beginning to think that's not the case. I rarely see her at night or on the weekends, so I suspect she has a house to go to when her people are at home.

She's friendly enough, although standoffish. If I speak quietly to her when I find her on my front porch, she'll slowly approach me and allow me to pet her. But not for long.

I think she's the real ghost kitty, because she seems to be able to disappear at will.

She's really quite a beautiful cat, with the requisite copper and white fur mixed in with the gray in her coat. If her gray fur were black and she didn't have a full white bib and a couple of white paws, she'd be a classic tortoise-shell.

She seems to spend her days making the rounds of the other front porches in the neighborhood. Although I realize there's no exclusivity involved, I'm delighted that she considers my porch to be cat-friendly.

Cassie? Well she's not so accepting. She frequently hisses her disapproval. The charming visitor, however, simply ignores Cassie.