ShareThisWhatever else you can say about the holiday season, it is surely a puzzlement to family pets. All the commotion and comings and goings cannot help but disturb their routines.
Heck, the industrial-strength festivities disturb my routines and I am just a hapless man-about-the-house trying to stay out of trouble. How much more confused must be dogs and cats and hamsters and parrots?
I wonder what my own dog Sooner makes of it all? He is part Springer Spaniel, which makes him very springy, and part Lab, which makes him very snoozy. In other words, he has two speeds -- irritating and unconscious, or to put it another way, he is poetry in motion and poetry in non-motion, depending on the time of day.
He probably grasps in a vague sort of doggy way that humans have their pups too and that these litters will return at odd times of the year and oftentimes bring their laundry with them.
For a dog, this is a special treat because it means something more to smell. Dogs are all about the nose and when they are reincarnated they come back as wine connoisseurs who use unrealistic phrases learned back when they were wagging their tails and trying to think of the words to describe the particular bouquet of a fire hydrant -- a hint of hose with accents of rubber boots perhaps?
Another source of joy is the Christmas Eve ritual when children place cookies and a cup of milk out for Santa. In their innocence, dogs do not know when they help themselves that they are acting like a fat, bearded fellow in a red suit. While visions of sugarplums do not dance in their heads, everything else in the way of exposed food does.
For dogs, the reason for the season is not the same as our reason. Theologically, dogs may not have eternal souls but they are eternally hungry.
That is not to say that dogs were not present at the beginning. St. Luke describes shepherds keeping watch over their flock by night and those shepherds would have had sheep dogs, that being something the shepherds' union would have insisted upon.
This raises an interesting scenario. It is easy to imagine what would have happened when the angel of the Lord appeared and then a multitude of the heavenly host, all proclaiming the good tidings of great joy.
Well, to a dog, it would have seemed like a sky full of mail deliverers demanding to be barked at. One can imagine a shepherd telling his ancient Palestinian Sooner: "Shut up already, will you? I can barely hear the good tidings!"
Of course, it is not just Christmas that might make pets confused. I am sure Hanukkah and Kwanzaa can excite their own share of yelps and growls among those members of the family who drink out of bowls.
It doesn't get much better, either. Soon New Year's Eve will be upon us with all its kissing at the stroke of midnight and drinking of the cup of kindness yet. Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? No -- if owners only remember to feed their pets before the revels begin.
This is my last column of 2008. It is something of a dog's life writing a newspaper column. Sometimes my slobberings are not appreciated. Sometimes I get pats on the head for being frisky.
I wish all my readers well, even those who are as puzzled by this column as Sooner is when carolers come to the door. I wish all of you unexpected cookies and milk.
(Reg Henry is a columnist with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. His email address is rhenry@post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
columnMust credit Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
