Catnip Roasting on an Open Fire
LeAnn Wester Stephenson
We have a crazy cat. She's called Eva June. She's a beautiful Maine Coon with striking yellow-green eyes . . . . she's also the spawn of Satan . . . wicked, evil, mean, and totally unsocial. She won't let anyone touch her, except me and on occasion my daughter, who's her Mom (but not her real Mom). Most of the time I want to dragon-kick her across the room for using the furniture as her own personal scratching post or string her up by her elbows for hacking up little kitty cigars that I will, without fail, step in with bare feet. But, for some reason, when she does want to cuddle, I'm her girl. Which makes me fairly sure that if we were trapped in the house in a blizzard and everyone died . . . . She'd totally eat me last.
I tell you that to tell you this, Christmas decorating at our house is like hugging our crazy cat, "Evil June:" a little dangerous, a little warm, and a lot of awesome. Tradition follows that we crank up the psychotically-challenged Christmas carols in her honor. To start, we play the old standard, "Do You Hear What I Hear?" to soothe Eva's schizophrenia. We celebrate her multiple personalities with, "We Three Kings of Disorient Are" and poke fun at her paranoia with, "Santa Claws Is Coming To Get You." As a tribute to her dementia we play, "I 'Think' I'll Be Home For Christmas" followed closely by her personality disorder's favorite, "You Better Watch Out, I'm Gonna Cry, I'm Gonna Pee, Maybe I'll Tell You Why." And finally we all join in with a rousing-ly manic rendition of, "Deck the Halls and Walls and House and Lawn and Streets and Office and the Stores and the Cars and the Buses and Trucks and Trees and Fire Hydrants and . . ."
Hope your Christmas decorating is bright, beautiful, and full of crazy kitty power. Here are few photos of our efforts.
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| We hung our Christmas wreath on our newly painted door! We added a bit of vintage silver and a wide red satin ribbon to our boxwood wreath to give it a little patina. |
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My girl baby was home from university and got to hang all of her childhood ornaments and reminisce . . . she loves to decorate the Christmas tree … … and my baby boy just loves the Christmas tree! |
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| Baby It Was Cold Outside! We had temperatures in the teens during our decorating extravaganza, so, the Hubbs built a roaring fire, chilled a bottle of champagne and threw down a sheepskin rug to keep our tootsies warm! 
I'm kind of partial to our Shiny Brite collections! I love to contain them in apothecary jars on the mantel, in silver Revere bowls on side tables and in niches!
 And this is what happens when I clean vintage brass and gold flatware all afternoon . . . |
