The Puppy and the Christmas Tree
The first Christmas we ever had with our brand-new puppy was certainly a memorable one.
A friend of ours had a dog that had just given birth to a litter of mixed-breed puppies that summer and when she was giving the puppies away, she asked our family if we wanted one. We decided to say ‘yes’.
The new addition to our family was happy and rambunctious, filled with wags, happy licks, and the endearing doggy enthusiasm for everything about life that any growing puppy normally has. Everything about our family and our home was new and exciting and interesting to her.
Because she was so happy and energetic, she had a tendency to get into everything. We had to spend a considerable amount of time in her early years saving our puppy from herself, doing everything we could to puppy-proof the house as best we could. But she still loved to get into things that she knew she shouldn’t have.
She was a very bright dog. When she got hold of something she knew she shouldn’t have had in the first place, like a facecloth from the bathroom cabinet or a wristwatch from a bedroom nightstand (or God forbid, the remote control for the TV), she would make sure that everybody saw what she had so we would all have to chase her around the house just to retrieve the item that she filched. She was never happier than when she was playing ‘the chase game’, running around the house with a forbidden item in her mouth, tail wagging, with a bunch of people chasing after her to get the item back. It was just a game to her, and she was happy in the knowledge that she had finally found a way to get everyone in the house to pay attention to her at that particular moment.
When we finally caught her, we would usually have a vigorous tug-of-war on our hands just to get the item back from the dog. Sometimes, we would have to trade her for a treat just to get the filched item back, which did not exactly set a good precedent for the future, if you know what I mean. But being an innocent puppy, you really couldn’t get mad at her, even though she could be quite exasperating at times!
Only when we began to physically block off access to open cupboards, cabinets, assorted tables and rooms, and keep other things up out of her reach, did her behaviour finally stop. Eliminate the source, and hopefully, you eliminate the problem.
But with Christmas coming, we knew that our young dog could be very rambunctious. We were concerned about what might happen to our Christmas tree. We were afraid the dog might harm herself if she took a decoration off the tree and ran around with it in her mouth or might innocently pull the tree over or chew on the gifts while she was playing. We were at a bit of a loss at that moment to figure out how to get the dog to leave our Christmas tree alone. We knew that our puppy might possibly see the new tree in the living room as a doggie toy to be enjoyed, chewed on, and played with.
But then our Mother had an inspired idea.
Just before we brought our artificial Christmas tree up from the basement to be unboxed, assembled and trimmed, our Mother dug our big old childhood playpen out of storage, unfolded it and set it up in the living room where our Christmas tree would normally be placed every year. A gift from our Grandma when Mom and Dad first got married, our old wooden playpen was still in very usable condition after being used to safeguard us three growing boys back in the day.
Now ready for the Christmas tree, we brought our tree up from the basement and, set it up and trimmed it in the newly assembled playpen to safeguard the tree from the dog. The dog wouldn’t be able to disturb the tree and we wouldn’t have to play ‘the chase game’ again over the holidays with our Christmas tree decorations or our gifts. The dog was now big enough and the wooden bars on the old playpen were close enough together so that the dog was not able to disturb the tree in the playpen.
We placed our gifts inside the playpen around the bottom of the tree, now secure in the knowledge that the dog would have to leave both the tree and the gifts alone. And to make sure the dog couldn’t possibly get into anything that might harm her, we only trimmed the top half of our tree in the playpen that year to eliminate the possibility that the dog might innocently get hold of and chew on a decoration on the bottom half of the tree that might bring her harm.
That Christmas was a special memory for our family, all of us gathered in the living room around our half-trimmed Christmas tree in its wooden prison with our furry new family member on Christmas morning.
But it was a happy Christmas, as it always was, as we welcomed the newest member of our family for her very first Christmas.
And because the puppy was now a full-fledged member of our family, there was also a Christmas gift for her under the tree that morning!
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all!