Catmas Tree

Catmas Tree

Now one of the best times of the year is definitely Catmas with its Catmas tree. I am sure it has been invented for cats specifically. It takes into account all our hunter instincts, ability to climb and chase, the skill of making  stealth attacks and vanishing acts. 

Let me explain to you what I love most about Catmas.

You guessed. The Catmas tree, of course. The ultimate decorated scratching post experience.  For this I give the humans full points. A beautiful tree right in the middle of the living room is wonderful in itself for a feline explorer, but the fact that all sorts of toys are hung on the branches for us is almost too good to be true.

Mommy and Daddy used to have a real tree for a few years, and I did not quite enjoy it like I did enjoy the fake tree. The reason is obvious - the needles of the real tree pinch your paws. The fake three, on the other hand, is like a ladder - the branches spread out like there were several umbrellas on top of each other, and the green stuff is soft You just get to the lowest branch and then climb up nice and easy (and fast, if you have just been to the sand box and feel the fire in your hinies still). 

The only bad point is the decorations make tingling noises, which alarms the humans to your whereabouts, but if you have already managed to climb high enough, and are safely near the tree trunk, and under the net of lights and strings of pearls, and a layer of easily breakable decorations, the humans have great difficulty in digging you out. 

Quite often they revert to food in this case, to get the cat out of the tree, which is mission accomplished from the cat’s perspective, of course. (In time they have learned to place the yummies at the root of the tree to make the cat climb back down - or else a cat flies out of the tree like Batman, with decorations hanging around its neck in its hurry to reach the kitchen. And don’t tell me cats can’t climb down trees. They can manage a decorated scratching-post-ladder any day if the incentive is strong enough.)

In this family we have come to an agreement with our humans - usually we don’t climb up the tree as long as there are baubles hung just for us in the tree. These are placed in the lowest branches and are of plastic so they don’t break when we flip them out and play hockey with them. Of course the element of food comes into play too. If we haven’t been given enough munchies, we know how to use the Catmas tree to get the humans’ attention. 

And as an additional bonus - what could be more fun than chasing noisy baubles through the house in the middle of the night? Or climbing up the Catmas tree just a little, to make the decorations make noise? It gets the humans out of bed at respectable hours, before sunrise,. Which is when we lead them to the kitchen to feed us, which is what life is about, isn’t it?

Now I have heard of this tendency to celebrate Catmas twice a year - in the summer  too.   I totally support the idea! I only ask you to consider the idea of making edible decorations…

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