a sure sign that the holidays are over

Pam got herself a pet kitten last week. This was part of her ‘new year’s resolution’ plan to create a more ‘homey’ home. And, naturally, homes without pets simply aren’t homey. “Besides,” she told me, “I read somewhere that it was good to have at least two heartbeats in your house.”

When I asked where she read this, she just sort of coughed and mumbled ‘Cosmo’. “But it makes a lot of sense,” she told me…though she failed to list the reasons why this heartbeat theory makes any sense. However, even after only two months of dating, I know better than to mention this.

Last night, as I was about to head off to bed, I got a frantic call from Pam. “OH MY GOD!” was the first thing she said when I picked up the phone. “You have to come over here, NOW! It’s my cat, Frisk…I don’t know what to do! Please hurry!”

And this was about the time that she screamed and dropped the phone. So I put some shoes on and headed out to my car. As I rushed over, images of her kitten, high on cat nip and holding a knife to her throat, crossed through my mind.

The first thing you notice when entering Pam’s apartment is her Christmas tree…which is still up even weeks after the actual holiday has come and gone. “I like to keep the holiday feeling around as long as possible,” she told me when I asked about it last weekend. And this tree, which is now more of a “Martin Luther King Jr. Day” tree than it is a “Christmas” tree, was still standing tall.

“Pam, just calm down and tell me what’s wrong,” I said as I was being grabbed through the open doorway and into her apartment.

“The cat,” she told me in a wavering voice, “just look at the cat!”

So I looked at the cat. And the cat looked back at me. And I crouched down and gave her a scratch behind the ears.

“She’s a very cute little kitten, Pam.” I said, still not sure what I was supposed to be looking at but feeling that this was a safe response.

“Not that end,” she said, “the other end. You know, spin Frisk around!”

So I spun Frisk around and was greeted with a strand of tinsel sticking out of Frisk’s rear end.

“I sort of thought that she might have been eating some of the tinsel off of the lower branches of the tree, but I wasn’t sure,” Pam told me.

“Well, I don’t think there’s any doubt now,” I said as I walked into the kitchen to grab a paper towel.

I came back, grabbed the end of the tinsel with the paper towel and pulled. To be honest, I was secretly hoping that there would be a popping noise as I yanked the tinsel from Frisk’s butt, much like those little party poppers that they used to sell. Unfortunately, no ‘popping’ sound, or any other festivities for that matter, ensued.

As I headed back to the kitchen to dispose of the towel and tinsel, I told her, “you realize, this gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘Sparkle Season’.”

“The Season is more than welcome to ‘Sparkle’ all it wants,” she replied, “but there will be no more sparkling from my cat’s ass! From this day on, I am declaring this a non-tinsel zone. And the tree is coming down tomorrow!”

The holidays are now officially over. Of course, depending on how many tinsel strands Frisk ate, they may be making a brief reappearance in another day or two.