The tree is down.
I want to be very clear about the tense there. Not "the tree fell." Not "the tree had a wobble." Down. Horizontal. The full length of it stretched across the good rug like something the guards would want photographs of, baubles scattered to the four corners of the room, the string of lights still gamely blinking away in the wreckage like a heartbeat monitor on a patient nobody's told yet.
And there, in the middle of it all, half-tangled in tinsel and breathing the slow even breath of the truly innocent, was Rattlin'. Asleep. On her back. One paw in the air. Looking — and I have had a full day now to choose my words — looking deeply, profoundly satisfied with herself.
It happened on Stephen's Day. Of course it did. The 26th. You let your guard down ONE day after Christmas, you have a slice of cold turkey in your hand and the football on low and you think, ah, the worst of it's over now, and that is precisely the moment a sixteen-year-old cat decides the six-foot Norway spruce in the corner is a structure that has gone unchallenged for too long.
I didn't see the ascent. I want that on the record too. I heard it. There's a particular sound — anyone who's lived with a cat at Christmas knows it — a sort of creak, then a rustle, then a single, ominous CLINK of a bauble making a decision it can't take back. By the time I was up off the sofa it was already physics. It was already out of my hands and into Newton's.
Here is my reconstruction, for the historical record.
She did not knock the tree over by accident. I refuse to believe that. I have watched this cat plan a glove theft with the patience of a chess grandmaster — if you missed that one, she has form, the woman has a whole criminal record — and I will not now insult her by suggesting she simply fell. No. She went UP. She got to about the two-thirds mark, to the good ornaments, to the little glass robin my mother gave me in 1998 that I take down every year and put up first, and she perched there, and she looked down, and she made a strategic decision about weight distribution that I think she's been considering since at least November.
The robin survived, by the way. That's the gas part. Of everything in that room, the one irreplaceable thing — the sentimental one, the one I'd actually grieve — sailed through the whole catastrophe and landed soft in the folds of the rug like it was set down by hand. The cheap baubles from the two-euro shop are in BITS. The robin's grand. There's a lesson in that somewhere and I'm too tired to find it.
The angel, though. The angel is gone.
The angel that goes on top. White dress, little gold wings, a face that's seen better decades. Been on top of every tree in this house since before this site existed, since before the very first session we ever wrote up here. And when I finally got the tree upright again and did the headcount — and you DO a headcount, you count your decorations like a shepherd counting sheep coming in off the hill — the angel was not present. Not in the wreckage. Not under the sofa. Not behind the telly with the dried pea and the hair bobble and whatever else she's hoarding back there. Gone. Vanished. Assumed taken into custody.
And the cat slept through my entire search. Snored, even. Did the little chirrup she does when she's dreaming. I stood over her with a dustpan full of broken Christmas in my hand and she did not so much as twitch a whisker, and I tell you, lads, I have never in my life felt so thoroughly OUTMANOEUVRED by an animal that weighs less than a bag of spuds.
I should be cross. I keep trying to be cross. But she's old now — sixteen, or thereabouts, the maths gets hazy the further back you go and I've stopped poking at it — and there's something about a creature that age still mounting a full assault on a Christmas tree that I find, against all reason, magnificent. The defiance of it. Most cats her age are content to sleep in a sunbeam and judge you. Mine's still out there committing acts of vandalism with a clear conscience. Long may it last. (I don't mean that. I do mean that. Both can be true at Christmas.)
So the tree's back up. Wonky, a bit, leaning into the corner like a fella at the end of a long night. Half the baubles gone, no angel, the lights blinking on regardless. And honestly? It looks more like Christmas than it did before. Lived in. Survived. A bit battered but still standing, which, when you think about it, is the whole of the song too, isn't it — the bog's still in the hole, the tree's still on the bog, no matter what falls on it.
If you've a cat and a tree in the one house this season, mind yourself. Anchor it to the wall. Learn from my Stephen's Day.
And if you're ever in Ennis and you see a small grey angel making her own way down the bog road, she's mine. Send her home.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — It's the 14th of January as I add this. I found the angel. She was inside one of my wellingtons in the back porch, face down, wings folded, three weeks she was in there. No bite marks. No drama. Just placed, carefully, in the toe of a boot, like a message I'm not clever enough to read. Rattlin' watched me find it from the windowsill and went back to sleep. I've put the angel up on the mantel now instead of the tree. Felt she'd earned a quieter posting after all that.